Game preservation & a question for Cody (Gaming)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Sunday, January 26, 2025, 16:14 (4 days ago) @ Revenant1988

2. (Cody question) When the 360 came out, I can't remember if anything was lost with backwards compatibility for Halo & Halo 2....was there?

There were a variety of little quirks.
And one extremely extremely annoying quirk with Halo 2 specifically: sometimes a "ghost image" of sorts would get caught up in the rendering pipeline, and act a bit like a stationary transparent image over your screen unless you quit out and restarted things.
There was also an issue specifically with Backwash, where the framerate would be obliterated on 360 whenever a cloaked player fired a weapon. That's part of why the map got pulled from the matchmaking rotation.

People sometimes claim that the emulation increased the rendering resolution, but this is false. Image quality was changed by the addition of MSAA, but the base resolution was still 640x480.
This is very easy to confirm via pixel-counting in areas where edges are defined by straight lines in textures, like the floor grating at the start of Halo 2:

I know the MCC and Halo CE Anniversary editions used the PC version of Halo and some things were lost as a result like effects and textures.

The biggest-ticket items for me are the broken atmospheric effects, and a variety of missing or modified aspects of the lighting. Although the patches in 2021 largely fixed these in the MCC version.

I don't recall the same thing happening with the jump from OG Xbox to 360, but maybe I'm forgetting? I feel like if you had the discs and a 360, you got the original experience still.

The 360 emulation is far, far closer to the original game than the 2003 Gearbox port (and original version of CEA's "classic" graphics).

Although, both are missing CE's animated fog effects.