Snowalker said:
I was wondering, since I have both a Ps3 and a Xbox 360. Could I buy the new Fallout 3 on Xbox Live, transfer it to a flash drive. put those on a computer, convert the files to something the Ps3 will recongize. Download it and enjoy. Is this possible, or am I talking about things that haven't been invented yet. If you think this would be illgeal, it shouldn't be because I bought it. So, do you think it is possible?
Well, it's more complicated than that. If you were talking about something as simple as a Fallout 3
plugin (like Project Anchorage) then, assuming you have the necessary hardware and knowhow, you might be able to just copy it over from your XBox 360 to PS3 assuming the software was designed in such a way as to handle plugins identically. They're all PCs, deep down.
Don't expect it to be something you could do by simply plugging in some cords and executing a copy, you'd actually need to have the knowhow to crack access to the proprietary hard drives on both consoles and move the software manually from one to the other, in just the right folders, in a way the game knows how to access it. There's probably an existing support structure for this to facilitate development, but that in turn probably requires special software to access. This is the kind of stuff you find being included in several thousand dollar software development kits [http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2007/11/sony-woos-developers-with-price-cut-for-ps3-development-kit.ars] for those consoles.
If you were talking about the actual game itself (not just add-on content) it would actually require recompiling the software in order to properly exploit the hardware on the different consoles. While they may all be PCs, deep down, they have different proprietary input/output mechanisms in that need to be addressed during compilation. Trying to run an XBox 360 optimized game on a PS3 system wouldn't work - the software would be making machine-level instructions to memory addresses which simply don't exist or are used differently on the other console. Anything could happen, depending on which addresses ended up getting poked, but you'd probably just looking at broken software that refuses to render. The only way around this is to actually have the source code, which is presumably not something found anywhere outside of secure Bethesda development servers, and recompile the executable for the different hardware.
It's the difference between downloading a movie to be played on a pre-existing movie player on a different platform versus downloading a movie player built for one platform and trying to run it on another. Plugins are essentially movies, while the game software is the movie player. The compiler is the factory that made the movie player from its parts, the source code.
As far as legality is concerned, you'd likely be breaking certain laws in regards to reverse-engineering to hack your consoles to perform a data transfer. Not that many hardware modding geeks care.
Trivun said:
I have to say that I'm not sure what to do here, or how to do what you've suggested, but you Americans get EVERYTHING cheaper than us Brits.
I'm pretty sure this has to do with import taxes and whatnot. If it's any consolation, a lot of games from Europe have extra fees tacked on them if Americans want to buy them.
