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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.
If Sony made this official there would be and endless list of wingers and whiners here on Slashdot complaining about how game X didn't work properly, and then go ballistic when the support is removed.
The Belgium Foreign Minister confirmed this morning that ISIS has ported Telegram to the PS2. He implored good citizens to switch exclusively to USB peripherals and await the banning of cash and TLS, technologies known to enable human trafficking.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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?
Yes, people have multiple consoles across the generations and use them to play older games where they're not able to play them on the newer systems.
Sony: We're not going to add emulation to the PS4, there's just no interest in it.
Microsoft: We've added emulation to the XBoxOne!
Sony: Shit. Guys, get coding...
Competition = good.
Summation 2
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).
This is precisely why I'm shying away from console games now. It wasn't too bad when the PC would gain emulation for the console titles over time (e.g. I can play nes, snes, n64, gameboy, playstation, playstation 2, gamecube, psp, nintendo ds, and wii titles fine on PC now), but as of PS3/Xbox360, things have gotten to the point where the chances of workable emulation are limited for the forseeable future.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Yes none of this generations systems has any significant backwards compatibility.
Yes see;
http://www.techeblog.com/index...
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
No but Sony and Microsoft seem to think we are.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
I haven't had any problems emulating an SNES with add-on stuff like SuperFX and Mode 7 graphics since, oh.. 450MHz PII-based Celeron using ZSNES.
ZSNES is fine if it runs the particular game you are trying to play. But it's not so fine for more obscure uses, such as compatibility with controller logs for console-verifiable speedruns, development of game mods and original games that work on the original console, and even a few games. From ZSNES Readme:
Jurassic Park and Kirby's Dream Land 3 use this feature for tinted transparency.
Perhaps if the developer chose x86 ASM instead of C++
Then it would require megabytes upon megabytes of :i386 libraries to run on an x86-64 operating system, and the emulator would itself have to be run in an emulator on ARM or any other non-x86 platform.
I haven't had any problems emulating an SNES with add-on stuff like SuperFX and Mode 7 graphics since, oh.. 450MHz PII-based Celeron using ZSNES. And everything pretty much works exactly as it did on the original system.
Sure. But the difference between "pretty much" and "indistinguishable from the original hardware" is not always a small one, and some people care about it more than others.
Visit the
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.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
There's backwards compatibility on the XBox One now, although it was only added within the past few weeks. If you own the original on Xbox 360, you can download the Xbox One version of the title without paying extra.
Note that a lot of games I revisit are not on the popular list.
I do however wonder if finally getting into the x86 architecture means they will have more x86 sensibility with respect to backwards compatibility moving forward.... On the other hand they may recognize the cash cow for now work that is rereleasing...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Most actually vintage titles get GoG releases. Many can also be emulated in DosBox just straight up.
Basically, if you don't want to keep your old PC hardware around (as you obviously do your old console hardware), then you have to take steps in software to play the games. With consoles, you don't have the second option at all- though the first option is a bit easier.