Amidst a consensus of speculation that Microsoft's Xbox Next (Xbox 2) won't be backwards compatible, hope appears for Microsoft's next-generation console to support Xbox games.

Xbox specialist site xbox-scene.com reports that Transitive has announced QuickTransit, an application that would allow for software to be run across different processors and operating systems without any source code changes -- boasting "100 per cent functionality, transparent interactive and graphics performance" and "near-native computational performance."

In an interview with Wired.com, Transitive CEO Bob Wiederhold gave an example of QuickTransit allowing the next-generation Xbox running the original Xbox software. "One of the key breakthroughs is performance. You can't tell the difference between a translated application and a native application," said Wiederhold.

Interestingly enough, the company's official page shows a diagram of a PowerPC processor emulating an x86 game. Coincidentally (or not), the Xbox Next runs on a PowerPC platform, while the Xbox runs on a PC-like Intel chipset.

Transitive has no known ties to Microsoft, but has noted that it signed agreements with "six of the world's largest computer OEMs" for "customer-written software support for their platforms" and that "strict confidentiality obligations prevent us from saying more about these relationships at this time"--raising the possibility that the two companies are working together to bring backwards compatibility to the Xbox Next.

From DIGIT