Sony Quietly Adds PS2 Emulation To the PS4 (eurogamer.net)

An anonymous reader writes: The Digital Foundry blog reports that Sony has added functionality to the PlayStation 4 that allows it to act as an emulator for some PlayStation 2 games. Surprisingly, the company did not mention that this functionality is live; a new Star Wars game bundle just happened to include three titles that were released on the PS2. From the article: "How can we tell? First of all, a system prompt appears telling you that select and start buttons are mapped to the left and right sides of the Dual Shock 4's trackpad. Third party game developers cannot access the system OS in this manner. Secondly, just like the PS2 emulator on PlayStation 3, there's an emulation system in place for handling PS2 memory cards. Thirdly, the classic PlayStation 2 logo appears in all of its poorly upscaled glory when you boot each title." Sony has confirmed the games are being emulated, but declined to provide any further details.

Comments

Wouldn't a PS3 emulator make more sense?

[Viol8]

I'm sure a PS2 emulator has novelty value but I'm not sure many people will really be that interested. Wouldn't a PS3 emulator make more sense given a lot of PS4 owners may still have a PS3 to play PS3 games and might prefer one console to do both? Or is the PS4 simply not powerful enough to do it?

Re:Wouldn't a PS3 emulator make more sense?

[tepples]

I can't remember if it was PS->PS2, or PS2->PS3 ... but essentially they achieved backwards compatibility by making the CPU for the previous generation the front-end processor for the new generation.

There have been several consoles like that. Sega Genesis included the Sega Master System CPU as a coprocessor mostly used for audio and a VDP that can fall back to Master System video modes. PlayStation 2 included the original PlayStation's CPU as the I/O coprocessor. Nintendo DS included the GBA's ARM7 as the I/O coprocessor.

There are a few other approaches to backward compatibility. One is to overclock the same CPU (Game Boy Color, Wii), possibly with more identical cores (Wii U). Another is to disable the previous CPU entirely when running new games (Game Boy Advance, PlayStation 3 with SACD logo).

Games from discs

[RogueyWon]

The big unanswered question is whether Sony will allow users to play PS2 games from their original discs. On the basis of what we've seen so far, there would appear to be no reason why this isn't feasible.

The worry, however, is that Sony wants restrict the system to online purchases made via a PS4, so that people who want to play PS2 games on a PS4 need to purchase the titles again, even if they own the original discs (and with probably only a tiny portion of the PS2's library being available for purchase).

Re:Let me get this right.

[JazzLad]

FO4 junkie here, it's no exception. My (bought used for $180 a year ago) GTX 680 works great in 4k (by great, I mean with anti-aliasing basically off - at 24" 4k doesn't really need it). Yeah, I spent a stack of cash on my monitor (mainly for Photoshop), but otherwise, I have a 6 year old (bought 5 years ago for about $100) AMD quad core processor & 8GB RAM (and a small SDD + large HDD) - it doesn't take much to get a better experience than consoles.