| naznatips said: For the 382,237,947th time people, the 40GB can NOT be given backwards compatability via a firmware update. It's missing absolutely necessary hardware components to run PS2 software. It's impossible. And obviously there aren't 40 million PS2 owners sitting on their asses going "Can't wait to buy that PS3." At least half of those have already upgraded to a Wii, 360, or PS3, and probably more than that. |
I wouldn't say 'impossible' just highly unlikely ...
The problem is that the PS2 and PS3 have very different architectures, very different instruction sets, and many developers programmed the GPU on the PS2 directly because there was no hardware abstraction layer present (and because you can get better performance from that). What this means is that the PS3 would probably have to perform a perfect emulation of the PS2 entirely in software.
Personally, I suspect the Cell processor is powerful enough to perform a full software emulation of the PS2 if you're approaching the real world maximum performance of the processor. As we know this is not an easy task, and if your emulator has underlying performance issues when emulation an instruction of the emotion engine (as an example) it can dramatically impact the performance of a game running on top of the emulator that uses that instrucion. Being that a large portion of the good games on the PS2 took decent advantage of the system's performance it is likely that any noticeable performance issue in your emulator could render a large portion of your best games in your library unplayable.
