The long answer is that Halo was developed and shipped before XBL was documented enough to develop for. The way Halo 1 was written, it's not possible to "patch" it for XBL support, so in order to play Halo 1 on XBL you'd need to buy a new disc.
Rather than throw together an XBL-enabled Halo with nominally the same content, they decided to just forge ahead and include it with Halo 2.
(I also think there are other issues-- the way Halo seems to handle System Link play indicates there's no client-side prediction in its network code, leading me to believe that it can't cope with a lot of latency, but that's purely speculation on my part.)
Comments
narcogen
No XBL for Halo until Halo 2
The short answer is "no, it doesn't."
The long answer is that Halo was developed and shipped before XBL was documented enough to develop for. The way Halo 1 was written, it's not possible to "patch" it for XBL support, so in order to play Halo 1 on XBL you'd need to buy a new disc.
Rather than throw together an XBL-enabled Halo with nominally the same content, they decided to just forge ahead and include it with Halo 2.
(I also think there are other issues-- the way Halo seems to handle System Link play indicates there's no client-side prediction in its network code, leading me to believe that it can't cope with a lot of latency, but that's purely speculation on my part.)
Narcogen
Anonymous (not verified)
Re: No XBL for Halo until Halo 2
In reply to: No XBL for Halo until Halo 2ok... :-(
thats to bad.
But there is always halo2 to look forward to :-)