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Forums - Sony - As all PS3s are backwards compatible with PS1, why isn't PS4 backwards compatible with PS2?

d21lewis on 16 January 2014

May have already been stated but PS1 was easy to program for. PS2 and PS3 were not. Emulation for them is hard to pull off.



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Fusioncode on 16 January 2014

This sort of emulation isn't easy.. Look how long it took them to get Playstation Classics on the Vita. This is why they're investing in PS Now. This way they don't have to create new emulators with each new console release.



Sigs are dumb. And so are you!

g911turbo on 16 January 2014
gigantor21 said:
g911turbo said:
binary solo said:

I feel like HD remake of PS2 titles is kind of done. But if PS4 was BC with PS2 Sony could put basically the whole PS2 library (or at least the good games) on PSN and right there you have a reason to buy a PS4 to replace your PS3 even if the actual PS4 library doesn't have much to offer you.

Sure with PS Now you will be able to stream some PS2 games without having to have built in BC. But it takes time and effor to convert a game to play via internet streaming, I assume, and how long will it be before a substantial number of PS2 games are on PS Now? It takes bugger all effort to plonk a game on PSN for normal old downloading. And then you have the people who still have a PS2 collection who like to play from time to time, and PS2 BC on PS4 would mean only needing 2 consoles in the house to be able to play all 4 generations of Playstation home console games.

PS4 must have sufficient processing power to be able to emulate PS2 without any problem.

Wait, PS3 was backward compaitible with PS1.  No joke I didn't even know that and I had one.

Seriously? You never tried it once? Damn, LOL.

No :( cone to think of it I'm not sure what classics for ps1 I'd really want to play on my ps3.

 

Off topic 

 

 

I hope they release and uncharted 1-3 remake hd for ps4 before they release uc4. That would be badass.  



prayformojo on 16 January 2014

Man, this is one of the easiest questions of all time. The answer? Because they want to make money. If they allowed naitive BC with PS1,PS2 and PS3 games, how could they sell PS Now? Answer? They couldn't.

What really pisses me off is the fact that Kaz promised PS platforms would always play discs from previous consoles. He said it right before PS3 launched, saying it would go on forever. A year or so later, guess what? They took it out because they saw what the virtual console was doing for Nintendo. Pretty soon, those PS2 games were for sale digitally on PS3.

It sucks, but the only way to prevent it would have been buying Wii-U's which, apparently, core gamers don't want to support.



oldschoolfool on 16 January 2014

playstation now is the answer. It's all about the $$$



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Ajax on 16 January 2014
brendude13 said:
They're not going to spend time and money creating a PS1 emulator for PS4 when they're offering backwards compatibility through Gaikai instead.


Is that payed or free bc?

If you have to pay for playing those ps1 games then thats not what i call bc. Thats buying the games you have again.



''Hadouken!''

lucidium on 16 January 2014

Who cares, a ps1 and PS2 console combined costs less than a cheap psn game these days, if you're so into old games play them on the original systems.



Pemalite on 16 January 2014
Kyuu said:
Pemalite said:
Kyuu said:

PS4's CPU is trash, it's barely an improvement over the 8 years olde Cell CPU. Maybe that plays a role.


What? It's a massive improvement over Cell.
Then again, Jaguar is still horrible, but it's still much better than Cell ever was, but that's to be expected, consoles haven't taken CPU performance seriously for a very very long time.

The reason for the lack of backwards compatability though is one of hardware, the Playstation 2 is radically different than the Playstation 4 in many aspects that makes a hardware based solution simply unfeasible.
Sony tried the hardware approach with the early Playstation 3's, the extra processors required drove up costs, it would have been possible if the Playstation 4 was an architectural evolution of the Playstation 2, instead the Playstation 4 is more like a cousin of a Mid-range PC.

However, the Playstation 4 is plenty powerfull enough to offer a fully software based approach and would even be able to employ techniques to improve image quality. (I.E. Upscale to 4k, then downsample to 1080P is one option, then apply some Anti-Aliasing and texture filtering and some post-processing effects.)
The reason why it would work is one of low level hardware understanding by Sony, emulators on the PC work by making the PC "Act" like it's a Playstation 2, some calls/commands require multiple passes to perform the same function that would be done in a single pass on a console, hence why on a PC you need a massively more powerfull system to pull it off.

However, Sony is a for-profit company, they are going to be more inclined to offer a paid approach via the cloud and lock you into the platform than a free one, it's not going to be ideal, but those are the cards that were dealt.

"To put it in lamens term think of Jaguar as a car that does 100 kilometers per hour, constantly, regardless of the road conditions.
Think of the Cell as a Car that does 50 kilometers per hour constantly, however when the road is straight and there are no bumps in the road it can accellerate to 150 kilometers an hour.

Thus, over time because the Cell has such a varying top speed, Jaguar manages to get to the finish line first."

 

 

These are your own words. You said that in a perfect world Cell could theoretically outperform Jaguar at some tasks. Yes you still said Jaguar averages better but who expects otherwise from a much more recent technology? It's not a real "generation" improvement.

Crytek's president himself said PS4 CPU's isn't much of an improvement over not only Cell but also X360's Xenon.

With that been said, you're making a very good point about the cloud and gaikai. It could even explain why they ditched CD compatibility as well so you buy PS1 games through the cloud.

I do remember posting that.
However, that's not exactly what I would call an accurate depiction of performance and it should not really be construed as such, I was trying to convey the relative strengths and weaknesses of each CPU architecture.

I also personally have zero idea what the newer instructions found in Jaguar are going to do for gaming performance either, especially AVX, however Jaguar is still a massive improvement over Cell in many aspects, such as Integers and Double Precision Floating point, something to keep in mind is that game engines and games aren't always static in the types of math they use.

I do agree that it's not a generational leap however, but that doesn't mean Jaguar isn't a massive improvement overall and it still pales in comparison to any decent PC CPU, but that's to be expected with such GPU centric designs which will offload some of the processing typically done on the CPU anyway.




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