PS3 Backwards Compatibility Confirmed

Thanks to Gamesindustry.biz for their story confirming that the PlayStation 3 will offer backwards compatibility with earlier PlayStation consoles via emulation, offering a quote from Sony boss Ken Kutaragi, sourced from the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun: "PSone runs on the PlayStation 2 through emulation rather than actual hardware. PlayStation 3 will offer the same compatibility for PS2 software and the format will continue forever." He also partially attributed the PS2's success to its multi-purpose nature, saying "[PS2] offers a sense of insurance because it is compatible with PSone and DVD movies", echoing earlier suggestions about DVD players in consoles, and obvious advantages to backwards software compatibility.

Comments

Re:gamecube2

[edwdig]

I wouldn't be surprised if the next Nintendo system was backwards compatible. I think they've learned that backwards compatibility helped Sony this round. Besides, there are a lot of people that want to play a few GameCube games, but not enough games to warrent buying the system. Maybe those people could be swayed to buy the next system since it could also play the games they missed this time around.

Nintendo did try to make the SNES compatible with NES games. The SNES CPU is a 16 bit version of the NES CPU, which has an 8 bit mode. The rumor is they had trouble getting it to work well enough, and decided it wasn't worth the time and money to work out the kinks.

All Gameboy systems are backwards compatible.

They didn't attempt backwards compatibility with the N64 as the SNES showed they could get by without it. Besides, the SNES was a 2d system whereas the N64 was a 3d system, so the hardware wasn't even remotely similar.

Re:I'm not sure about the "PS1 emulation" part...

[GrosTuba]

OK, here's the link : PS2 specs

Basically, it says :
IOP (I/O Processor)
CPU Core: PlayStation (current) CPU (R3000)