Why did sony removed BC from the PS3

[NJ5]

montrealsoon said:

NJ5 said:

Lolcislaw said:
Does getin' rid of BC really saves them that much money in terms of manufacturing? So if Wii got rid of GC compability it would be much cheaper?

The Wii doesn't use Gamecube chips for BC. The Wii's CPU and GPU are backwards compatible, so they can run Wii games as well as GC games.

There's some cost to BC on the Wii but it's probably very small... I can't see any special costs other than the controller ports which are probably very cheap.

 

 

I think it's fair to say the Wii is an enhanced GameCube.

The costs associated to BC would be more the inclusion of the controller ports/ memory card slots.

I could see a future Wii without the GC slots (a la DSi with no GBA slot)

 

 

Indeed, hardware wise the Wii is an evolution of the Gamecube according to what I've read. It is a quite smart way of getting BC almost for free, and I can see Sony and MS doing a similar thing in the next gen to get BC.

Interestingly the 360 also has quite good BC without being an evolution of the Xbox, but I put that down to two reasons:

- The architecture of the Xbox is cleaner and therefore easier to emulate than the PS2 (a PC like architecture should be easier to emulate than the whole gob of simultaneously running cores and DSPs the PS2 has).

- The 360 is just very powerful so it can emulate many Xbox games without too much effort.

In any case, 360's approach doesn't come near the Wii's which can run virtually all GC games.