Backward compatibility, a big deal, & technically difficult (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Wednesday, June 17, 2015, 14:52 (3450 days ago) @ dogcow

Apparently, they've built a software version of the 360 (i.e., emulation).

So, traditional emulation then. Wow. So, he mentions "putting the game through the program". I wonder if they're recompiling it to native instructions... I'd love to hear more of the technical details behind it & I'll be interested in the performance of the emulation. However, I am sad to hear you can't use original kinect games with it though. :(

A while ago, Transmeta was working on JIT compilers that could translate code on the fly, and curiously they could end up as fast, or in some cases faster than native code. In fact, if you ran the JIT compiler on code native to the target platform, you'd get a speed boost! This was because the JIT compiler had tons of data about how the program was being used: what branches are usually taken, which pieces of code are loaded together in memory frequently, etc, and could therefore optimize the generated code in a way impossible for a static compiler, as well as cache the code so it doesn't have to translate it again.

http://archive.arstechnica.com/reviews/1q00/dynamo/dynamo-1.html

Maybe this is something similar.