I will sleep happy tonight. HD support comes automatic on Xbox 360 for Halo and Halo 2. Can you say, 720 p, and anti-aliasing?

~720p means that the resolution is much higher - 720p has 920,000 pixels, while standard old 480i (what you’ve got on your normal TV) has only 307,200 pixels. That’s about three times as many!

Thus, split-screen is now much more useful. For example, split-screen in 720p means that, for a two-way split, each half of the screen has more pixels than a standard TV has for the entire screen! If you split it in four, each screen has 75% of the pixels of the entire 480i screen.

The point is that things that used to be only a few pixels in size (far away objects, small objects) will now be drawn with many more pixels - thus they will look more realistic, and will be easier to differentiate. Immersion will be more complete.

~720p is a widescreen mode. The actual resolution is 1280 x 720. 480i is 480 x 640. See how the aspect ratio has changed to 16:9 from 4:3? The screen has increased in pixel count vertically by 33%, but horizontally by 50%.

The upshot of widescreen mode is that you’ll have better peripheral vision when you have the screen to yourself. Did you know that, right before Halo 2 shipped, they narrowed the field of view? I imagine they did it for frame rate reasons - if you reduce the number of pixels being drawn, by putting blinders on the view, you speed up the frame rate. It has always felt like tunnel vision. Well, widescreen fixes that, as you can now see to your sides. Imagine walking around all day with your hands cupped on the sides of your head, blocking your vision, and then taking them off again and getting a new glasses prescription. Kinda like that.

~720p is progressive scan. That’s what the little ‘p’ means. Normal TV’s at 480i only draw half of the lines for every pass the electron gun makes across the screen. Even, then odd, then even, etc. In progressive scan mode, every line is drawn for each pass of the gun. Essentially, the screen is drawn twice as many times per second. It actually appears to have greater visual resolution than 1080i (even with 1080i’s increased resolution), because all of those lines are being drawn. Also, undesirable flickering around narrow, horizontal images is eliminated.

~Anti-aliasing means that jaggies are reduced. If you draw a diagonal line on a raster (pixels made of squares) screen, you have to draw a stair-step looking pattern. It’s quite noticeable if the image is not moving, Anti-aliasing adds pixels to the side of that line that fill out the line, making it seem, well, more like a line.

All of this takes serious muscle. Tripling the number of pixels being drawn, and anit-aliasing the screen (which involves going over the entire image, after it’s been created, and smoothing out lines), requires a much better graphics card than the Xbox has. Originally, Halo 2 was supposed to be 720p. Shortly before the game out, however, it was down-graded to 480p due to frame-rate issues.

Enter the Xbox 360. It has graphics horsepower coming out it’s ba-shnozzig. If you’ve got the Harddrive peripheral (you did get the Premium version… right?), it’s got the emulation profiles for Halo and Halo 2 factory-installed. All you have to do is pop the game in, and blammo, you’ve got graphics coming out the ba-shnozzig.

It will interesting to see, now that the gauntlet has been thrown down, to see if other game manufacturers will upgrade the emulation profiles for their original Xbox games, as well. Are there any games out there that we’re actually going to play on the Xbox 360 that weren’t made for it? Other than Halo 2? Well, at least until Halo 3 comes out?

P.s. - Bungie said that they will reveal more about this resolution enhancement at bungie.net on Friday. Watch for it!