Virtual PC reports fuel further Xenon speculation

The question of Xbox 2 backward compatibility is open once again, courtesy of Internet reports that the Xbox technology team is working on graphics card emulation for the next version of Microsoft's Virtual PC software.

Virtual PC is a package which ships with the professional version of Microsoft Office for the Apple Macintosh range, and allows the Windows operating system and PC software to be run on Macintosh hardware.

According to a report from website AppleInsider, a future version of the software is due to provide advanced graphics card support for the first time - allowing owners of NVIDIA boards to emulate a 32Mb GeForce 3 in Virtual PC, while ATI owners will get emulation of a 32Mb first-generation Radeon part.

The relevance to the Xbox 2 comes because according to anonymous sources quoted by AppleInsider, the graphics card compatibility is being worked on by engineers from the Xbox team, rather than by the Virtual PC team itself.

This would suggest that the Xbox group has people working on the problem of graphics card emulation, and obvious parallels are drawn between the architecture of the current G5 processor based Macs and the forthcoming Xbox 2, which will also be based on a variant on the G5.

However, a number of logical flaws exist in this analysis - not least the fact that the VirtualPC software is expected to offer ATI emulation to ATI users, and NVIDIA emulation to NVIDIA users, while the Xbox 2 would need to emulate an NVIDIA board (as used in the original Xbox) on an ATI chipset (which will be used in Xenon).

While it does seem likely that Microsoft has engineers working on the thorny problem of Xbox emulation, senior sources at the firm have previously indicated that it isn't considered to be a priority for the Xbox 2 project.

In light of this, it seems plausible to suggest that any involvement in the VirtualPC project on the part of the Xbox engineering group is simply a case of the firm applying the graphics expertise of the Xbox team to another area of its operations.

That being said, this rumour is certainly more plausible than the last one we heard about Xbox backwards compatibility, which surfaced when a small Silicon Valley start-up claimed to have found a way to provide seamless cross-platform emulation (a "holy grail" of computer science) that would solve the problem of Xbox / Xenon compatibility.