Why aren all Xbox games backwards compatible with the Xbox 360?
If you are one to wonder why only a limited number of Xbox games are backwards compatible where as all Playstation games were compatible with the Playstation 2 at the time of its launch, you are not the only one. The short answer is hardware vs software emulation. The Playstation 2 actually had both system built inside the Playstation 2 box. The hardware was somewhat similar so cost and space could be consolidated. While hardware emulation was a possibility with the Xbox 360, Microsoft took a different approach with software emulation. Software emulation is a very time consuming process to implement but it was preferable to hardware emulation since the Xbox was a relatively expensive system to produce and shared almost nothing in common with the Xbox 360. Having two systems inside one box would have driven up the cost and more importantly (or so Microsoft thought so) the size of the system. Software emulation requires a big investment of time to implement and is implemented on a title
