| dbot said: 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.
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The 80GB Playstation 3 still includes the Graphics Synthesizer (the PS2's GPU) which means that they only have to emulate the Emotion Engine in software.
| akuma587 said: Microsoft did it with the 360, although I don't know if this was based solely off of software or a combined hardware/software approach. That system needs more resources than the PS2 does, although its architecture is admittedly more similar to a PC. |
Being that Microsoft designed both the XBox and XBox 360 to use DirectX (which acts as a hardware abstraction layer) the XBox 360 only has to emulate the XBox's CPU and can "Translate" all of the calls to DirectX and let the XBox 360's GPU handle it. In order to get their 'wonderful' level of compatibility for the XBox on the XBox 360 Microsoft bought a company which focused on emulating x86 processors on powerPC based Apple PCs; in other words, they had a team of people who were experienced (and existing software which was focused on) performing the emulation they needed done.
Basically, no system that I have heard of included software backwards compatibility of their previous generation system without having previous generation hardware unless the GPU of the previous generation system was entirely handled through a hardware abstraction layer.
