is it true for you 80 GB owners? or is the guy's PS3 is crappy ? if true, then that might be why Sony doesn't want an emulation update for Backwards Compatibility , since it got all these issues.

Wait.  The 80GB PS3 can now run PS2 game disks?

the special edition one that came with MGS4 i believe.

So they put software emulation in for ONLY a special edition PS3, even though it would presumably be free for them to issue as a system update for everyone else, and the PERK in their SPECIAL editon was in fact broken?

Sounds dubious.

Got a link?

Not just the MGS4 ones though, it was in the original PS3 80 GB models that released in the US as well.

EDIT: I don't think it was totally software based, they still had a part of PS2 hardware inside the PS3, it was just much less then what was in the original models.

well THIS is why i think Sony no longer doing software emulation, you see there are lots of issues.

I can't believe that people are unsure about this even on a site like vgchartz. There has NEVER been a PS3 with PS2 software emulation. However the European and some late US models came with part hardware and part software emulation, with one chip (I think it was the CPU being software emulated and the GPU being hardware, could be the other way around though, check the wikipedia article.)

I got the European version, and was there issues with some games yes, but it was a relatively long list of games you could play perfectly fine too.

So let me summarize, there has NEVER EVER been a PS3 with just software emulated PS2 support and this is why current PS3 systems got no PS3 support, because they got no PS2 hardware (to save costs) and Sony never managed to get the software emulator their worked on in-house performant enough to put it in again. There is no evil conspiracy here, Sony did not cut PS2 support to be able to sell the HD versions, in fact there income potential of being able to sell all PS2 games on PSN would be bigger. It just turned out to be technically infeasible.

I'd say it is more logistically infeasible rather than technically. The PS3 probably could run some form of PS2 emulator, but it would take too long to develop. The PS2 is a funny machine in a couple of ways leading to big issues in reproducing its hardware exactly. There just isn't enough potential money to off-set the guaranteed loss of developer time and thus money from other projects.

software emulation was never as good as full BC.  The full BC PS3s basically had all the bits of a PS2 needed to get exactly the same support.  The SW emulation PS3s did not.

There's no mystery here.  He's just showing games with known issues - the emulation was never 100% and there was a list in the internet that showed which titles ran perfectly, which had some issues (such as R&C slowdown) and which wouldn't work at all.

As BC seems to have dropped of the radar Sony quietly seem to have left the emulation where it is, and I don't think they've fixed anything new or added any new PS2 titles for ages now (could be wrong, please feel free to correct me if I am).

I have a software emulation PS3 and basically around 85% percent of my PS2 titles run perfectly on it - even better in some ways as the emulation includes upscaling and smoothing of the image over the native non HD PS2 image.  Around 10% of my PS2 titles run with issues as shown in this video and I never bother playing them on the PS3 and the remaining 5% or so were never supported by emulation at all.

This is actually, if you have a software emulation PS3 and used the list of supported titles, very, very old news.

@ reasonable )

well, you shouldn't call it a "software emulation" PS3 though, because the pal and 80GB BC versions run a combinend software and hardware emulation, because the graphics chip couldn't be emulated by software..

the PS2 gfx chip was slow as hell, but it has RAM on die, which has a better bandwith than the PS3's GPU RAM - that probably is the reason why it's not easily possible to emulate it with the PS3 (it would probably have to be programmed for every game individually, which Sony deemed as a not viable)

btw afaik some few games, namely the Singstar PS2 games, run on every PS3, because they are supported by pure software emulation