Digital Foundry vs Xbox One backwards compatibility

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When Microsoft announced that backwards compatibility would be hitting the Xbox One this year our collective jaws hit the floor. Even factoring out the effort involved in mapping the Xbox 360's GPU functions to entirely different Xbox One hardware, the idea of translating the 360's tri-core 3.2GHz PowerPC CPU to six low-power x86 Jaguar cores seems like a herculean task - yet somehow the engineering team has delivered. It's not perfect in several cases, but the fact that the virtualisation works at all is a supremely impressive achievement.
Unlike the spotty backwards compatibility available on Xbox 360, which required a custom wrapper for each individual game, Microsoft has taken a more extensive approach through the use of a virtual machine that runs on the Xbox One as a game in and of itself. This virtual environment includes the Xbox 360 OS features, though they remain unavailable to the user, enabling the software to behave as if it is running on original hardware. The Xbox One then views this "Xbox 360" app as its own game allowing features such as screenshots and video sharing. The emulator supports both digital downloads and original DVDs, though discs simply act as a key, the core data downloading over the internet via Xbox Live.
As part of the preview program, backwards compatibility is still in development and currently only supports a small list of titles. Of the games available, there are reports that only North American and region free discs currently function with Xbox One, regardless of the origins of the console (we used US discs for this piece). Furthermore, Microsoft is still working on a solution to enable support for multi-disc games - something that isn't currently working. While the majority of the initial titles are relatively basic and not much of a work-out for the VM, there are a few more demanding titles on tap including Mass Effect and Perfect Dark Zero. We sat down and put some time into several of these games, the idea being to stress-test the virtual machine's capabilities and to ascertain its strengths and weaknesses.
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