Sony Quietly Adds PS2 Emulation To the PS4 (eurogamer.net) 151
An anonymous reader writes: The Digital Foundry blog reports that Sony has added functionality to the PlayStation 4 that allows it to act as an emulator for some PlayStation 2 games. Surprisingly, the company did not mention that this functionality is live; a new Star Wars game bundle just happened to include three titles that were released on the PS2. From the article: "How can we tell? First of all, a system prompt appears telling you that select and start buttons are mapped to the left and right sides of the Dual Shock 4's trackpad. Third party game developers cannot access the system OS in this manner. Secondly, just like the PS2 emulator on PlayStation 3, there's an emulation system in place for handling PS2 memory cards. Thirdly, the classic PlayStation 2 logo appears in all of its poorly upscaled glory when you boot each title." Sony has confirmed the games are being emulated, but declined to provide any further details.
Because of the endless whiners (Score:3, Insightful)
If Sony made this official there would be and endless list of wingers and whiners here on Slashdot complaining about how game X didn't work properly, and then go ballistic when the support is removed.
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Now I have that stupid "Seventeen" song in my head. Thanks, jerkass.
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The compatibility of this emulator must be quite bad, given the fact they must be using all sorts of speedhacks and multithreaded insanity that leads to innacuate timing to make the quite weak jaguar cores handle emulation in realtime and probably the emulator must require per game tweaking as happens with the nintendo 64 emulation on the Wii virtual console.
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But no, after all it is Sony's pool, with complimentary urine
Also, that's not a Baby Ruth chocolate bar floating in the water.
What I want to know is when are they adding "Other OS" back?
Re:Because of the endless whiners (Score:5, Informative)
What I want to know is when are they adding "Other OS" back?
Just so people don't get confused and think that "Other OS" was something that the PS4 previously had, it was a feature removed from the PS3.
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Re:Because of the endless whiners (Score:5, Informative)
the USERS removed it when they upgraded the firmware
And I fixed a bunch of security issues when I ran Windows Update this morning. Except that no, it's not really me that did that.
You're also conveniently failing to mention that firmware updates aren't exactly optional. Some PS3 software (games or apps) require the most recent firmware, giving you the choice between keeping OtherOS, or keeping your PS3 usable for other tasks.
US army
A minor point, but it was the USAF that built a PS3 cluster.
many butthurt morons were butthurt because they thought, incorrectly, that this "other os" feature allowed for piracy
Not that I've ever seen, no. It was about running Linux. It was tinkerers that used OtherOS, not pirates. Sony used the hypervisor to deliberately break GPU access, iirc, presumably to prevent gaming on OtherOS.
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No, it was the US Air Force, like I said. [wikipedia.org]
What is At the very least meant to mean anyway?
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I wonder if you're both right. Heck our University had a PS3 cluster, but we didn't have a Wikipedia page. It was quite a cost-effective solution at the time. It wouldn't surprise me if several government departments did this.
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The ps3 slims removed that feature from the box description.
NO PS3 boxes mention OtherOS or Linux, I don't know why some people think they did. And yes, I have checked. (CECHE model PS3) Did some shops in the UK/EU slap Tux stickers on PS3's or something?
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I think of the people chewing into the troll, yours is the best answer. If you bought a PS3 able to boot Linux (an advertised feature, and on the box) that is also able to play online games (same), you had to choose. If you choose the first option, you forever lost your ability to play online games (and many other games would later check for version- basically your box was now dead to everything from that point in time forward). If you chose the second option, you lost the Linux capability.
It was real ba
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If you bought a PS3 able to boot Linux (an advertised feature,
I wouldn't exactly call OtherOS an "advertised feature". Sure a few Sony people talked about it in interviews with sites like Ars, but that's not really advertisement but promotion. They're two different things. Use the right word for the job. OtherOS was "promoted" and "documented" (In the PS3's larger manual), but not "advertised". Hell, Sony's "OpenPlatform" website wasn't actually indexed by search engines back when the PS3 launched.
[quote] and on the box)[/quote]
OtherOS/Linux was never mentioned o
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you essentially just said you don't see any other uses for the ability to run Linux on hardware that was purpose built for media playback other than military cluster computing and game piracy? Either you are being intentionally obtuse with the intention of trolling or you are incredibly unimaginative and just plain ignorant of the potential the PS3 had as a HTPC running Linux.
Indeed. I had YDL on mine. It could handle plenty of basic computing tasks. For example, Firefox on the PS3 was a much better browser than the silly Netfront based browser the PS3 had at first. (The browser the PS3 currently has is by the same company but is webkit now, it's "some" better)
It was great for music playback, more functionality than what is built into the PS3. Video not so much, unless 720p or lower.
It had OO, GIMP. and most of the usual applications LInux distros have. There was even IBM'
Re:Because of the endless whiners (Score:5, Insightful)
What I want to know is when are they adding "Other OS" back?
What I want to know is how many people whining about Other OS being removed ever used it or realized the limitations to it in the first place. Or understood the implications for their console (saturation levels of piracy and a death spiral into shovelware) if it had allowed to remain in place.
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Why hasn't the PC had a similar "death spiral into shovelware" despite being designed from the ground up for Other OS (with the exception of very few recent models with locked-down Secure Boot)? It has shovelware, as it is the first line platform for amateur productions, but why hasn't this caused "a death spiral"?
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Why hasn't the PC had a similar "death spiral into shovelware"
Haven't you seen all the low budget mediocre indie shovelware out there?
And it is something of a death spiral, because developers that want to make "real money" go cross platform in ways that they didn't do in the past.
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It should be quite obvious to anyone why Sony disabled Other OS. It wasn't because of the handful of people who actually used it (and I was one of those unlike the vast % of people complaining) or even those running MAME or SN
Then why no IBM PS/3? (Score:2)
Then why didn't IBM start selling Personal System 3 computers in order to provide an alternative that fulfilled the original intended purpose of Other OS, namely training developers for its Cell architecture?
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Turns out that even the SNES emulator (forget which) would be stupidly slow thanks to the hypervisor taking over half the resources on the ps3.
What? SNES emulation ran fairly well for me when I tested it. Did you have VRAM swap enabled? And which Desktop environment were you running? It matters, for some reason the default E17 caused a performance hit. You were better off running Gnome2 or XFCE
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I suspect you might well be surprised at the hardware used by people who use Slashdot. With a few exceptions, I think the majority of people here seem quite intelligent and logical but have somewhat of an aversion to change and unnecessary innovations.
Speaking purely for myself, I built my computer in 2011 with a i5 2500k and maxed out the RAM. Then I spent £60 on a low end graphics card because - why spend more when I have a console for gaming and a media player (WDTV at the time) for watching downlo
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I suspect you might well be surprised at the hardware used by people who use Slashdot. With a few exceptions, I think the majority of people here seem quite intelligent and logical but have somewhat of an aversion to change and unnecessary innovations.
Speaking purely for myself, I built my computer in 2011 with a i5 2500k and maxed out the RAM. Then I spent £60 on a low end graphics card because - why spend more when I have a console for gaming and a media player (WDTV at the time) for watching downloaded shows and movies?
I might be in the minority, but I don't think it will be a tiny minority.
What kind of geek builds a low-power PC? The only acceptable answer is "a broke geek"; otherwise turn in your geek card.
When I built my computer in 2011, I built a tiny god. It had all the fast, and 12 cooling fans. This summer I dropped in a new graphics card and it's still in the top 10% of benchmarks (and has half as many fans, a single new card was faster than my old SLI setup). I'm thinking about liquid cooling for my next build, not because extreme overclocking is the best way to get a fast system,
Let me get this right. (Score:1)
As someone who has never had a console, do I understand correctly that people normally have to re-buy games when they upgrade their consoles? i.e. not like a PC where something 20 years old can, sometimes with a bit of hacking, still be played on your current machine.
That's... ugh... do you just stack all your consoles in your living room so you can select the appropriate one for the games you have? Are you people made of space and money?
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Yes, people have multiple consoles across the generations and use them to play older games where they're not able to play them on the newer systems. [google.co.uk]
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As someone who has never had a console, do I understand correctly that people normally have to re-buy games when they upgrade their consoles? i.e. not like a PC where something 20 years old can, sometimes with a bit of hacking, still be played on your current machine.
That's... ugh... do you just stack all your consoles in your living room so you can select the appropriate one for the games you have? Are you people made of space and money?
Indeed! This has been going on for nearly 40 years. Welcome to today.
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This is precisely why I'm shying away from console games now. It wasn't too bad when the PC would gain emulation for the console titles over time (e.g. I can play nes, snes, n64, gameboy, playstation, playstation 2, gamecube, psp, nintendo ds, and wii titles fine on PC now), but as of PS3/Xbox360, things have gotten to the point where the chances of workable emulation are limited for the forseeable future.
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This is all true, but it's slightly offset by the recent trend to re-release (and modernise) some of the more popular previous-gen games.
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Note that a lot of games I revisit are not on the popular list.
I do however wonder if finally getting into the x86 architecture means they will have more x86 sensibility with respect to backwards compatibility moving forward.... On the other hand they may recognize the cash cow for now work that is rereleasing...
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getting into the x86 architecture means they will have more x86 sensibility with respect to backwards compatibility moving forward
True, but if the games are using low-level graphics APIs, you're only half-way there.
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PC Gamer here.
I bought a new video card recently for 200. The previous one lasted around 5 years and it was purchased for about 250. It kept up with most games rather nicely and only started showing its age with newer titles about a year ago. Ram and processor are good for a while yet. 8GB DDR3, Phenom 2 1090t
Stacks of hard drives? Really? No need. 3tb drive holds it all nicely. Games I am currently playing get moved to the ssd.
I also do not have 6 consoles plugged into my TV, with their various con
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I don't think keeping a PC constantly up to date is really necessary to enjoy a majority of games. Sure some people spend hundreds of dollars on multiple video cards, high end processors and fancy monitors from Korea but it's not necessary. Mostly because so many PC games are optimized for console hardware released 10 years ago. If your monitor only goes to 1080p you can usually max out the specs anyway. You can run a 4 year old video card and still enjoy most PC games. Because as I said unless you want so
Re:Let me get this right. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Most actually vintage titles get GoG releases. Many can also be emulated in DosBox just straight up.
Basically, if you don't want to keep your old PC hardware around (as you obviously do your old console hardware), then you have to take steps in software to play the games. With consoles, you don't have the second option at all- though the first option is a bit easier.
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Most things with CD tried to be backwards compatibility, most things with cartridges not so much.
I'm pretty sure I know people who have several game consoles spanning a very long time .. like back to their Super Nintento.
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Most things with CD tried to be backwards compatibility, most things with cartridges not so much.
Except anything in the Game Boy or Nintendo DS line, which support at least one generation of back-compat: GBA and GBA SP can run Game Boy and GBC games, DS and DS Lite can run GBA games, and 3DS, 2DS, and New Nintendo 3DS can run DS games.
I'm pretty sure I know people who have several game consoles spanning a very long time .. like back to their Super Nintento.
That and there are still third-party games coming out for the original Nintendo Entertainment System, three decades after the console's launch.
if it still works and there are games you still like .. why just throw it away?
Presumably to save recurring rent/property tax money by moving to a smaller home.
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The idea was that when you reduce the area of your home by 30 percent, old consoles are among the first to go.
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That's not really accurate. Sure the Playstation line was Backwards compatible up until half way through the PS3's life span but none of the Sega Disc based consoles were BC. However Sega's Genesis could play Master system games with the appropriate adapter. (the adapter was really only there for the slot to accept the cartridges). Also the Atari 5200 and 7800 could play 2600 games. The gameboy's were almost al
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5200 was not 2600 compatible. People were really angry!
This was a major error from Atari; that and the 5200 joysticks.
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It varies.
In the old day each new console was a very different system that was basically totally incompatible with it's predecessors, if you wanted to keep playing your old games you had to keep your old consoles around. Sometimes a game would be re-released for a newer console but this was the exception not the rule. If a game was re-released and you wanted to play it on your new console then yes you did have to re-buy it. Often such games were packaged together into compilations for the re-release.
The pla
Re: Let me get this right. (Score:2)
Not as much of a trend as you think. Atari 7800 was compatible with 2600 games. Sega broke that trend as well. Mega Drive was backcompat with Master System, and 32x was also backcompat with Mega Drive by way of being an addon (as you could put your MD cats on top of the 32x and they would generally work).
Also Nintend broke that trend in handheld - all GBA systems but the GB Micro could play original B&W GB games. Each successive handheld has at least supported one previous generation of consoles.
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Yes none of this generations systems has any significant backwards compatibility.
Yes see;
http://www.techeblog.com/index... [techeblog.com]
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
No but Sony and Microsoft seem to think we are.
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As someone who has never had a console, do I understand correctly that people normally have to re-buy games when they upgrade their consoles? i.e. not like a PC where something 20 years old can, sometimes with a bit of hacking, still be played on your current machine. That's... ugh... do you just stack all your consoles in your living room so you can select the appropriate one for the games you have? Are you people made of space and money?
We just keep the old consoles. They're not that big -- maybe a foot across. And (until they got internet connectivity) they were mostly guaranteed to work forever without user intervention.
Backwards compatibility on PCs was not trivial before DOSBox, and I understand that running Windows 3.1 games is still pretty difficult. Keep in mind that consoles don't have a single standard architecture. Different consoles in the same generation are not compatible, and the hardware on consoles changes much more from ge
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I haven't had any problems emulating an SNES with add-on stuff like SuperFX and Mode 7 graphics since, oh.. 450MHz PII-based Celeron using ZSNES.
ZSNES is fine if it runs the particular game you are trying to play. But it's not so fine for more obscure uses, such as compatibility with controller logs for console-verifiable speedruns, development of game mods and original games that work on the original console, and even a few games. From ZSNES Readme [sourceforge.net]:
Jurassic Park and Kirby's Dream Land 3 use this feature for tinted transparency.
Perhaps if the developer chose x86 ASM instead of C++
Then it would req
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I haven't had any problems emulating an SNES with add-on stuff like SuperFX and Mode 7 graphics since, oh.. 450MHz PII-based Celeron using ZSNES. And everything pretty much works exactly as it did on the original system.
Sure. But the difference between "pretty much" and "indistinguishable from the original hardware" is not always a small one, and some people care about it more than others.
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> Perhaps if the developer chose x86 ASM instead of C++, he wouldn't need a multi-GHz CPU to properly emulate things.
And he'd have a bunch of limitations as to where he could run it, then.
The "right" way to right an emulator is probably with several tuned hardware specific pieces of code for the parts that are the most resource intensive, cobbled together with a high level language- but you have to maintain each separately. If you expect a random emulator to have the same sort of support as the Windows
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Most DOS or Windows programs could be run directly until the 64-bit versions of Windows.
Lots of games worked, but many didn't. Good luck getting sound from a game that expects an ISA Sound Blaster or Adlib card. Some games used software delays to control the execution speed, which became unusably fast on newer CPUs. Regardless, having to install an old operating system is not what I'd call backwards compatibility.
The thing I miss most in 64-bit Win7 is the ability to enter 80x25 text mode. It really brought back the feeling of playing old Infocom games for the first time.
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Regardless, having to install an old operating system is not what I'd call backwards compatibility.
Whatever the game is, Good Old Games will have it eventually. They have lots of very early games with goofy requirements, that run effortlessly in my 64-bit Win7 gaming machine.
Games written for 10-years-ago Windows tend to run fine with the emulation built into Win7. Games that actually followed the MS rules to ensure compatibility (rare, but they exist) from last millennium work. Starcraft released 17 years ago and still works. I'm not sure if I can drop in my Diablo CD from 19 years ago (haven't trie
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Well, kinda, but not entirely that simple. I've probably re-bought more computer games than console games, really.
I play my Atari and Nintendo (original NES, and SuperNintendo) games on my PC in emulation.
My original computer games were for the Mac OS 6 through 9, none of which are compatible with my curent MacBook running OS X, so I either don't get to play them anymore, or I re-purchased them for PC. GOG.com makes this relatively inexpensive, and honestly it's easier and cheaper (in terms of time) to re-b
Sony vs. Terrorism (Score:3, Funny)
The Belgium Foreign Minister confirmed this morning that ISIS has ported Telegram to the PS2. He implored good citizens to switch exclusively to USB peripherals and await the banning of cash and TLS, technologies known to enable human trafficking.
Wouldn't a PS3 emulator make more sense? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure a PS2 emulator has novelty value but I'm not sure many people will really be that interested. Wouldn't a PS3 emulator make more sense given a lot of PS4 owners may still have a PS3 to play PS3 games and might prefer one console to do both? Or is the PS4 simply not powerful enough to do it?
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There's probably a lot of old titles people would still play if they could, and which can probably make some additional revenue from.
I can't remember if it was PS->PS2, or PS2->PS3 ... but essentially they achieved backwards compatibility by making the CPU for the previous generation the front-end processor for the new generation. The theory was backwards compatible was essentially free.
It's entirely plausible the PS4 can't emulate a PS3 fast enough ... but I bet there's a lot of side scrollers and o
Re:Wouldn't a PS3 emulator make more sense? (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't remember if it was PS->PS2, or PS2->PS3 ... but essentially they achieved backwards compatibility by making the CPU for the previous generation the front-end processor for the new generation.
There have been several consoles like that. Sega Genesis included the Sega Master System CPU as a coprocessor mostly used for audio and a VDP that can fall back to Master System video modes. PlayStation 2 included the original PlayStation's CPU as the I/O coprocessor. Nintendo DS included the GBA's ARM7 as the I/O coprocessor.
There are a few other approaches to backward compatibility. One is to overclock the same CPU (Game Boy Color, Wii), possibly with more identical cores (Wii U). Another is to disable the previous CPU entirely when running new games (Game Boy Advance, PlayStation 3 with SACD logo).
Super 8 famiclone (Score:2)
the Super Famicom is backward compatible with Famicom games with a cartridge adapter.
Are you referring to something like the Super 8 famiclone [blogspot.com]? That's no more "backward compatibility" than a ColecoVision Expansion Module No. 1 [colecovision.dk], Super Game Boy, or Game Boy Player accessory because all the NES processing hardware is in the Super 8 adapter. It just uses the Super NES for power and controllers. It's not like the Power Base Converter, which just mapped Master System cartridge pinout to Genesis. Or was there another adapter I'm missing?
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PS2 is easier. Note this is probably like the PS1 emulation in PSP, good enough to work almost all the time, but limited by Sony to make sure a given title works and/or is tweaked to work under the emulator before blessing it.
Also, porting from PS3 might be more in reach for companies than PS2 back catalog, simply because being newer means they are more likely to still have the assets to build the title.
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I'm sure a PS2 emulator has novelty value but I'm not sure many people will really be that interested.
It's the same logic as the Virtual Console section of Nintendo's Wii Shop Channel. Only a PlayStation 2 emulator can play PlayStation 2 exclusive games. A heck of a lot of those were produced for a console that clearly outsold the contemporary Xbox and GameCube consoles. Emulating the PlayStation 2 allows SCE and participating game publishers to produce revenue from these games.
Or is the PS4 simply not powerful enough to do it?
I suspect that to be the case. PlayStation 4's processor (a 64-bit Jaguar, DO THE MATH) is reportedly clocked lower than PlayStatio
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Who cares about clock speeds? Even if the PS4 had a current-day top-of-the-line CPU, emulating a Cell processor with usable performance would be an enormous -- probably impossible -- task.
The Cell is quite exotic: it's radically different from most CPUs. I imagine it would be a nightmare for software emulation.
On top of that, you'd have to emulate the GPU, which would another enormous (maybe impossible) task.
A more practical alternative would be to set our sights lower, and for Sony to create tooling to sim
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The PS3 was going to have this problem from the start- the cell architecture was just too exotic. The only way we would have PS3 emulation on the PS4 is if the PS4 kept to that exact design concept- and that's just punting the problem to whenever it's no longer wise to keep down that design path.
Playstation NOW is Sony's answer (Score:2)
I'm sure a PS2 emulator has novelty value but I'm not sure many people will really be that interested. Wouldn't a PS3 emulator make more sense given a lot of PS4 owners may still have a PS3 to play PS3 games and might prefer one console to do both? Or is the PS4 simply not powerful enough to do it?
Sony's solution is Playstation NOW. It is a streaming service to let you play PS4 games on your PS4 using a streaming "rental" model. The plan is to include PS3 games at some point.
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PS3 now and PS4 emulation later. I got the order mixed up.
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This is the same strategy they took with backwards compatibility on the 360. Essentially, you put in your old XBox disc and it downloads a recompiled binary for the new architecture off Xbox live.
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As someone who has shipped a few PS2 games and did PS3 dev support, emulating the 3.2 GHz PowerPC [wikipedia.org] along with the 6 SPUs on an 8-core x86 would have been a **huge** performance hit.
Why?
Remember the PS4 is only running at a pathetic 1.6 GHz. [wikipedia.org]
In contradistinction the PS2's CPU [wikipedia.org], the EEE, only runs ~ 300 Mhz. Likewise the other processors, the VU0, VU1, GS, SPU run at ~ 150 MHz. (The SPU runs only at 8 MHz.) FAR easier to emulate -- you basically just throw hardware at the problem. :-) At that is even accoun
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Indeed, emulating a Cell with usable performance is a huge task. There's also the GPU. I imagine emulating the PS3's nVidia GPU would be quite a task. PS3 games use a low-level API to access the PS3's GPU, so it wouldn't be easy to map things across to the PS4's (totally different) GPU. (The PS4's GPU is by AMD, and of course GPU architectures have changed quite radically over the years anyway.)
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Citation needed. Interesting if true though.
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I have so few games that "struggle to run" under software backwards compatibility under a PS3. The list on Wikipedia is quite short when you compare it to the thousands of available titles. The only titles that tend to cause me trouble were music games where the timing and sync of audio and video was tantamount to player success.
Short version (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony: We're not going to add emulation to the PS4, there's just no interest in it.
Microsoft: We've added emulation to the XBoxOne!
Sony: Shit. Guys, get coding...
Competition = good.
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Sony is notorious for over-promising and under-delivering on Playstation hardware and software capabilities. This would fly in the face of much of their history. I suspect it was simply cheaper to pull off an attempt at emulation to try and make this bundle of Star Wars games work, vs trying to build it again, as a quick cash grab.
Games from discs (Score:3, Interesting)
The big unanswered question is whether Sony will allow users to play PS2 games from their original discs. On the basis of what we've seen so far, there would appear to be no reason why this isn't feasible.
The worry, however, is that Sony wants restrict the system to online purchases made via a PS4, so that people who want to play PS2 games on a PS4 need to purchase the titles again, even if they own the original discs (and with probably only a tiny portion of the PS2's library being available for purchase).
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I suspect more it's a carry over of the capability from PS3. Not the original hardware capability to play the discs, but the later capability they had to help developers massage PS2 games to work on PS3 through their online store. It wasn't able to flat out run an existing game unmodified, but mitigated the amount of stuff a developer had to do to get it to run on a PS3 by emulating a lot of the stuff that was within reach.
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I thought the PS4 had a Blu-ray drive, all of which read DVD and CD. If the PS4 can't read CD-ROM, that's a software issue, not a hardware one.
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I think the PS4 can *read* cds technically, but it had no media player app that can play audio cds.
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I'm still not sure how to play Blu-rays on my PS4. I gave up after about 10 minutes and just popped it in the PS3. Worked immediately.
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Really? I just tried it for the lulz and it was pop in disc, and select the disc from the main menu. Aliens was playing in all of 10 seconds.
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You put in a disc, a "Blu-ray disc" tile will show up in the UI. select it with the controller.
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Frustrated now. I was about to buy a refurbed PS2 off ebay or something (interior components of the controller ports on my last model literally crumbled apart, which is apparently not uncommon) to get my Katamari and DDR on again, but now I'm not sure if I want to wait and get a modern console instead.
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It seems unlikely that this will be released as a generic thing on the PS4. If you have space in your house for a working PS2, and a desire to play those games, then you should get the hardware.
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DDR games are generally emulated really poorly due to the need to have really good timing sync between the audio and video signals. You're better off sticking with the PS2 if you don't want to fail every dance.
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I can't speak for Katamari, but assuming you have a PS2 dance pad...
http://www.stepmania.com/downl... [stepmania.com], plus
http://stepmaniaonline.net/ind... [stepmaniaonline.net], plus
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ... [amazon.com], equals
A near-equivalent, if not superior, DDR experience on your computer.
It's not "disc emulation" (Score:2)
When the Wii began offering SNES games, nobody called it a "SNES emulator." This is exactly what PS4 is doing, they're adding PS2 games onto the marketplace for PS4 (which may or may not be using an emulator, who knows/cares). But you cannot insert PS2 discs and expect it to work.
This is how you... (Score:2)
Recipe: How to add a full fledged, previously tested feature to a new platform without creating false expectation like guaranteeing support for all cases of such feature.
Seems pretty fair to me. Microsoft just dumps features and markets them without the least relevant release notes, such as supported titles, and then we need to resort to the ends of the internet for seeing what we should rush snipe on eBay that will most likely Not Work (tm).
The emulator is not fully supported (Score:2)
They haven't tested it for all games. So, they only support using it for this special case. Also, they probably don't want to encourage game makers to use it, but rather recompile (and retarget) their game for better support.
It is like running World of Warcraft on linux. The company has a linux build of the game. They don't release it. They don't support running WoW using Wine. They won't ban you for playing WoW using Wine. Their anti-cheat program will detect you using Wine to run their game, and will appr
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The are absolutely not recompiling the games for better support. They are emulating the games.
They might have to recompile the emulator to support more games later.
WINE, as I will point out twice, Is Not an Emulator.
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Sony would prefer games to be optimized for their latest hardware, but if a company pressures them enough to simply use an emulator to save development costs they will allow it.
Yes, they might fix up the emulator in the future to support more games, which is why it is not for general purpose right now.
Sorry, if my last line was confusing, I was referring to Sony, not Blizzard in reference to an emulator.
Meanwhile... (Score:2)
...most people continue to silently not really care, because the PS2 is so far removed from the last generation that only a small subset of people will actually be interested in this.
They really should have focused their efforts on the PS3.
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The first editions of the PS3 have PS2 hardware in them, allowing you to simply stick a PS2 game in and play.
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The first editions of the PS3 had a CPU/GPU hardware, changed to a GPU hardware/Software PS2 compatibility, and finally removed all together.
Sony later started releasing "PS2 Classics" on their store. These are fully software based emulation and could be ran on any PS3 including the ones that had PS2 compatibility removed.