- Bad is subjective. I have no issue playing any system from an atari 2600 to present on a modern TV. Only ROB and Lightgun games are acutally impossible to be used.

- You can get Composite to HDMI converts. But the smart thing is to buy a TV that has all ports. They are still made. Also, older consoles are slowly being moded to have HDMI added on. N64 and NES are currently being completed. SNES and GEN are starting up.

- Region logic on old consoles, no problem. All my systems are bypassed. And have no problem.

Tbh I think BC benefits all systems that implement it, PC has it down the most and will always have it down while Wii U has it down for some of their titles along with XB1 trying to accomplish it themselves, all Sony needs to do is bring back the PS1-2 and 3 games to their one system and start carrying them over from there on. I don't think that one is going to oust the other though in terms of BC though.

"It is clear that Microsoft Xbox One will benefit enormously from backwards compatibility."
Is that a dig at MS that all current gen Xbox games are shit, so you pretty much have to use BC?^^

Also, I doubt it. Doubt it would benefit the PS4 from a business sense as well.

I can honestly say when I had a launch PS3 that could play PS2/PS1 games, I never used it, I now have an Xbox one that can play X360 games, and i've not even tried it.
Backwards compatibility is a great feature, but not a critical one.

Also, I am somewhat dissapointed that Microsoft haven't made original xbox games backwards compatible.

I think Sony is going to eventually make PS1/2 games compatible.. in the form of "PS Classics" where you have to buy them all over again.

Backwards compatibility isn't a huge selling feature, but it's an awesome fan service to those who either already own or are already interested in your platform. I don't own my PSone or PS2 anymore, but I could rattle off a long list of games I would gladly go out and buy again in physical form to play them again.

And given these are decade+ old classics, I think it would even be superior to Xbone BC in some regards, simply because not much time has passed since I played the titles on Xbox One BC.

yeah i was dissapointed, the original Xbox is x86 which is the same architecture and its the weaker console to be emulated. And all OG xbox games could be BC and they could even look better in 720p. They are using BC more for marketing and what is trendy right now instead doing something which makes more sense for the consumers in the long run, thats my biggest critism i have with the current BC plan for the Xbox One.

-thats because Pong doesnt look different on any TV. You have to understand that older consoles dont look much worse on more mordern TVs like the 2D console era 8 and 16 bit for example. But more mordern games like PS2 games look bad on mordern TVs. 480p or even 720p emulation would make a huge difference with these games.

Sure, I bought a PS4 so I can play a game made in 1998
Can't wait to pay $9.99 for a pixelated mess with crappy controls, while on the other hand vomiting in disgust that my new game is only 1079p/55fps.

You know I could understand why they don't have PS2 backwards compatibility. PS2 emulation isn't that fantastic.
However, is there any real explanation why PS1 classics aren't on PS4? It's not like PS1 games are on PS Now.

It's almost 2016. I don't think BC matters much to the typical console gamer to be quite honest.

It is nice to have, but has usually been problematic to some degree :

PS3 only some early units played PS2 games, and not all of them worked perfectly.
PS2 only the fats played PS1 games, and not all of them worked perfectly.
X360 only played a handful of OG Xbox games, not sure if any had issues.
X1 only plays select games, and they basically have to be downloaded/reinstalled due to the recompile. Some work great/better than original, while others have issues, and availability is sketchy title for title.

AFAIK Wii Gamecube emulation was pretty excellent, but I think that got dropped as well (or did they just drop the ports? Honestly I have no idea)

The best backwards compatible platform has been the PC for obvious reasons, but it also helps to know what you're doing, as much older games often need one or more things like DosBOX, DX9 optional download, GLide wrapper, widescreen patch, community patch, modified INI, custom shortcut (run in compatiblity mode and/or run as administrator), etc. It's easy when you know what you're doing and have reasonable google skills, but is daunting to less advanced users in many cases. But that's probably par for the course when you're talking ~30+ years of titles encompassing many MANY tens of thousands in total.

A hypothetical gen 9 Xbox and Playstation should definitely have BC, unless they decide to drop x86, or they change architecture and certain games utilize features that aren't a part of the new systems. One way this could happen is with Jaguar/GCN's version of asynchronous compute. AFAIK, it's virtually unused today, but I could see late-gen games using it to achieve the final pushes forward in maximizing gen8. If Gen9 uses something non GCN, then making the ACE code work with an altogether different implementation may not be possible in a feasible fashion.

In a way, that's the problem that faces PS4 in running PS3 stuff. The Cell was ludicrously sophisticated for the time, and we even saw benchmarks where in raw CPU ability the Cell 3.2Ghz wasn't very far off of the Jaguar CPU in the PS4. The way Cell worked was absolutely nothing like an x86 environment either, so emulation would take an inordinate amount of power to achieve unless the games were recompiled in such a way to run natively x86. Worse, the Cell was also often used to divide up the SPEs in order to help with graphics work, turning a difficult task in emulation into something that would take divine intervention to achieve.

We're getting into the meat of gen8 though, backwards compatibility might have meant a little in 2013, but 2016+, it's purely niche. There are simply too many major games hitting for many people to care about gen7 titles. And for anyone who really cares strongly about playing gen7 games, the best overall result will always be to play on gen7 consoles (that are plentiful and cheap, and I'd imagine most players with that much invested in gen7 will simply keep their console if interested).