| HappySqurriel said: Personally, I doubt it ... A long time ago I was looking into writing an emulator and at that time the general consensus was that it took between 8 and 12 times the processing power to do proper emulation in software without doing instruction translation; and instruction translation is far buggier and has massive compatibility issues. Now, unlike the XBox (which had a hardware abstraction layer for the GPU), the PS2 hardware was quite regularly directly accessed from code which means that you need a high level of hardware compatibility for most programs to run well. I suspect the Cell Processor is probably fast enough to emulate either the Emotion Engine or GPU from the PS2 without using SPEs but I suspect that it would require most/all of the SPEs to emulate both processors at the same time. In my opinion this would be a nightmare to develop because you're attempting to emulate a sequential system on a parallel system and you need nearly full processing power from the parallel system and a high level of compatibility in the final system to get most things to run well. Is it possible? Probably, is it likely? not really ... |
You do realize the 80 gig PS3 already does PS2 software emulation, right? The original 20 gig and 60 gig PS3's actually had the emotion engine. The EE was value engineered out of the 80 gig in favor of software emulation of PS2 games. Only the 40 gig lacks any sort of PS2 support. Many believe that that was more of a marketing decision to differentiate the price points/value of the 40 gig, 60 gig, and 80 gig offerings at the time. Now that Sony has officially killed the 60 gig (this is a shame), they are left with 2 sku's. This is why many people believe that Sony will offer PS2 compatability in the 40 gig via an unlock patch.
It is a rumor, but I have always believed Sony would offer PS2 bc in all of their sku's. This is vital if they want third parties to continue to support PS2 titles.
Thanks for the input, Jeff.
