A few stories today also on whether or not the Xbox 360 is going to play games for the original Xbox. Many cite backwards compatibility with the PlayStation as one of the PS2's primary advantages; according to this analysis of console backwards compatibility at hardgeus.com, Sony achieved this by including an entire PS1 on a chip inside the box, eschewing software emulation because PlayStation developers bypassed the official APIs in favor of the extreme optimizations they could get by writing directly to hardware, something that would have made emulating the older console's APIs in software utterly useless.

Last week, Xbox corporate vice president Peter Moore told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that Microsoft still doesn't know if they can make the new Xbox backwards compatible, but that a decision would be made by this Monday, May 16th. That meshes with what J Allard said after the MTV event. Ars Technica has taken a detailed look at the challenges posed by console backwards compatibility.