I recently blogged in another one of my blogs about Microsoft pulling the plug on game compatibility between the original Xbox console the and newer Xbox 360. Many people like me have invested significant amounts of money in the old console as well as many games. Now that they are not longer going to promote game developers to develop compatibility I would recommend turning development to the Open Source community. And by Open Source I do not necessarily mean GPL, a term that is obviously anathema to not just Microsoft but most of the proprietary software world.
I am fortunate enough to own both and have invested considerable amounts of money buying games for my 5 year-old. Most of these games are rated E so he can play without confronting too much blood and gore. However, until now, most of the games that were made compatible were the more popular Teen or Mature rated games. An open source community of dedicated developers would very quickly evolve and turn the E-rated games into compatible games for the Xbox 360 using Microsoft XNA. XNA is Microsoft's game development platform and a set of APIs. However, it is only meant for Windows and Xbox 360. Clearly, no further development is going to take place on the old Xbox, either by way of hardware add-ons or software. I think it is time to turn it over to a community, preferably open source. Eventually, with the Xbox Live platform some of these older games could be made available to the Xbox 360 platform. If money matters to Microsoft, and it obviously does, they could end up making some money when they present these games on Xbox Live. Anyone at Microsoft listening? I doubt it.