Quote Originally Posted by RAIST View Post
The problem is that the PS2 is simply extremely dated hardware, using extremely dated software/firmware. Eventually it simply becomes too much trouble with the legacy code to be worth supporting it anymore compared to the more efficient way of supporting it on newer platforms. If they are to keep this game alive and well for the future, they may very well one day have to scrap some of that problematic code and do some recompiling to keep it stable on the newer platforms. We've already begun to see problem with Win7 and video card driver support issues. There are some older i486 based games (written in the Win3.x and Win95 era) that throw up on themselves when you try to run them on today's systems. The same can potentially happen with the legacy coding/emulation going on with FFXI---eventually, it just isn't worth it to try to support that older code in newer environments, and some of it simply has to go.
But today's PCs are completely compatible with Windows 3.1 and earlier. Intel CPUs now support 64bit and have twice the number of registers but completely backward compatible with any PC that conforms to IBM's original specs for it's PS/2 line. And the PS2 CPU is quite a bit more sophisticated than Intel's processors.