My friend and I have been forming a hypothesis over the past few weeks... One that involves the initial reaction to Sony, MS's 2007, and the 40GB PS3.

IMO, since the PS3 went through so many changes pre-launch, I think Sony was forced to initially include hardware BC when they may not have wanted to do so. After all, given the power discrepency between the PS2 & 3, software emulation is definitely possible. And given some of the things that were rushed at launch (namely XMB), it wouldn't surprise me one bit if some features were forced out of the launch window entirely.

Now, the 40GB model... Am I the only one who was surprised at how quickly this thing popped out of nowhere? A new motherboard, new 65nm processor, no hardware BC whatsoever. Strange, IMO. A pretty quick turnaround for a major hardware redesign.

My theory is that Sony always planned to move to software emulation in an attempt to cut costs later in the PS3 lifecycle. I think the pressure from MS, poor sales, and outrage over the launch price forced their hand, making them release models long before software emulation was available, forcing them to cut BC entirely. Not the prettiest of situations but they may have felt that the lower price was worth the short term risk of a reduced feature set.

I still believe that software emulation is on its way and ultimately, all PS3s will play PS2 games. This is all wild speculation on my part, but it seems to make sense. A few points:

- Why would Sony want to keep PS2 hardware in the PS3 forever? That's expensive.

- How would they transition away from the hardware? Software emulation is a lot better than cutting BC entirely.

- How were the 80GB & 40GB models designed, tested, and put into the retail channel so quickly?

- Why would Sony now appear to be attempting to eliminate all models with hardware BC?

Dunno, just a few thoughts I had rattling through my brain the past few weeks. What do you guys think? I believe that what we're seeing right now is a knee-jerk reaction by Sony to right the ship in hopes that it will carry them into the era when software BC is available for all PS3s and people aren't being forced to buy PS3s with reduced feature sets. And, given the sales, it seems as if it might be working.

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Well, since you don't work for Sony, you have no clue whether or not they planned on putting out the eighty gig or not. They obviously did not plan selling so little, but in the future they could have planned to take out b/c if they needed to cut costs, etc. It's called planning for the future, not every decision made by SCE had to do with not selling great. Also, what is wrong with XMB?

It launched with no in-game support, no cross-chatting, no background downloading, etc.

It had one year to look at Dashboard and improve on it, but launched with half of Dashboard's most important features missing. I call that a problem.

And like I said, it's speculation. Thanks for reiterating my own point.

i think they want to move away from the ps2 as quickly as they can...so they are trying to get rid of BC but the fanbase still want that feature---its all a ploy to move more ps3 based software

There is no way to know, but I personally suspect ...

Sony really did not intend to release the PS3 in 2006 the (unexpected) release of the XBox 360 in 2005 forced Sony to accelerate their release schedule; I suspect that when the XBox 360 was first rumored to be released mid 2005 Sony became worried that 18 to 24 months on the market with no (direct) competition could give Microsoft the opportunity to eat away a big chunk of Sony's marketshare.

If it was released for Q4 of 2007, the PS3 would have been more powerful and less expensive due to the 65nm process, Blu-Ray diodes would be less expensive and more people would be looking for a Blu-Ray player, and HDTV adoption would be higher.

I think you're probably right. Software emulation is a much better solution in the long term, but it takes time.

We already know they have been hiring coders with emulation experience.

So basically you think software emulation was planned to be released at the same time as the 40 GB, but the need for higher sales caused them to release the 40GB model early.

I suppose it's possible.

"right now is a knee-jerk reaction by Sony to right the ship in hopes that it will carry them into the era when software BC is available for all PS3s"

What exactly is a knee jerk reaction? The release of the 40GB?

When the 40GB was released, it was released with a lot of planning. Marketing strategy, advertising etc. Everything was prepared. As for 'righting the ship', it seems to have done just that. PS3 sales have picked up, and the 40GB has been widely accepted by consumers.

It's unclear whether it's even possible to emulate the GS on the current hardware and how much it will cost. It's considerably more complex to emulate the GS than the EE.

When I say "knee jerk" reaction, yes, I mean the release of the 40GB. It's possible that they had something in the works (namely the 80GB version), saw the sales, and panicked a bit, pushing out a unit before they wanted to. They had to do something and maybe that's all they had that was capable of changing things quickly enough.

I just find it hard to believe that they always planned to launch two new SKUs in the 12 months after launch. 

With enough processing power you can emulate anything ...

As a general guideline (from a few years ago) it took about 8 to 10 times the processing power of a system to fully emulate it in software; with instruction translation you can dramatically reduce this requirement but (unless the architecture is very similar) it tends to be very buggy.

I suspect that the Cell is powerful enough to emulate the EE or GS on its own, but it is not powerful enough to emulate them both together, and Sony may be trying to use the RSX to aid with emulation of the GS but is running into difficulties because they are not similar at all.

Microsoft has an advantage with this because the XBox GPU was accessed through DirectX's hardware abstraction layer, and the XBox 360's GPU is accessed through DirectX's hardware abstraction layer, which means that they can probably interperate the calls through the DirectX API to emulate the GPU even though the processing power difference between the XBox 360 and XBox is (fairly) small.