Sony PS3 Back on Board for PS2 Emulation?
If you were one of the lucky (patient, rich, faithful) who bought a first generation PS3 when it was released, you could and still can play PS2 games. Lucky bastards. The 20 GB and 60 GB models ran software hardware emulation from an actual PS2 chip within the PS3. This eventually caused a few issues with some select games so Sony decided to scrap emulation (amongst other reasons) for their next generation of PS3s (80 GB 120GB). Something that truly and utterly sucked.
However; there is some good news as of late for the suckers with more hard drive space. It turns out that a patent has recently been discovered by Siliconera involving the use of the PS2s emotion engine. The PS3s Cell chip would directly translate code from the PS2 Emotion Engine making it much more stable and reliable than emulation performed on the software level.
This basically means that it will be etirely possible to play any PS2 game on any PS3 model. I'll definitely be keeping my eye on this one as it's a feature I missed out on by picking up my PS3 late in the game.
Thank God! That's fantastic news, "on any PS3 model." I was "lucky" enough to purchase a PS3 right when they discontinued the backwards compatibility feature.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed.......that might make it hard to play any video games until they officially announce this :)
This is sooooo awesome!!!! If this can be reality, i will buy PS3 instead XBOX 360....
you seem to be a bit misinformed. the orginal ps3s used HARDWARE bc, not software bc aided by the ps2s cpuand gpu. also the first 80gb model used partial hardware bc, the gpu was on the pcb but the cpu was emulated, THIS is where there were problems. finally the actual reasons for the removal of ps2 backwards compatibility were not because of issues with it. first it was done as a cost cutting measure (though sony only saved a grand total of around $20 doing this), the second is that until recently the ps2 was outselling the ps3 on a monthly, and yearly, basis, so sony dropped ps2 bc so they could continue selling ps2's. sony will probably add in ps2 emulation at some point, but dont expect it until ps2 sales start to tank.
as i said, sony will add in ps2 bc to the ps3 some day, but i wouldnt expect it anytime soon, as sony would much rather make profit off selling ps2s then drop it and the profit it makes completly.
Thanks for the comment. I could have sworn there were problems with many, if not most of the PS2 games. I stand corrected...big time.