PS3 Forum - Playstation 3 Forums

birdbeast · #1 04-22-2008, 04:39 PM

Greetings

Let me preface this post by saying that I am in NO WAY trying to start a flame war; I am simply asking a simple question with an honest desire to learn the answer. In the past, while discussing this subject, I have inadvertantly angered people prone to allowing their emotions to affect their rationales, which is certainly not my goal. If you are so prone, I ask that you please not read this thread.

In general, I am wondering if the PS3 will ever natively support playing PS2 titles in high resolution/HD (that is, 1280x720/720p or 1920x1080/1080i/p).

I am aware of the current capability of upscaling the 480i/p signal to the target HD resolution, but this is not native emulation in high resolution -- it's taking 640x480 pixels and enlarging them to be drawn in a higher resolution.

I am curious as to why this ability is not already present, especially considering the competition. Please don't mistake me for a "fanboy" -- I own an Xbox, a PS2, and a Gamecube -- I didn't play favorites last generation. I also own a 360 and a Wii, and as soon as a game comes out exclusively for the PS3 that I want to play (or as soon as Six Feet Under and/or Battlestar Galactica comes out in Blu-Ray!) (or as soon as the PS3 can natively emulate PS2 games in HD), I will own a PS3.

That said, it seems reasonable that the aforementioned emulation can be done, considering the following:

- An emulator exists for the PS2 (PCSX2) that can run a small number of PS2 titles at 60+fps in 1920x1200 on a mid-to-high-end desktop PC (2 logical cores @ 3.0GHz, 4GB RAM, nVidia Geforce 8800GTX). I personally have played through FFX, FFX-2, Devil May Cry 3, Kingdom Hearts I/II, etc. on my PC, and have personally observed frame rates above 60fps at 1920x1200 (which is slightly higher resolution than 1080i/1080p).

- The Xbox 360, a console one year older than the PS3, can emulate the vast majority of games for the Xbox, a console one year newer than the PS2, in 1280x720 natively. Considering that, from the standpoint of pure silicon, the 360 has one fewer processing core than the PS3, its emulation target (the Xbox) has 16 times the RAM of the PS3's emulation target (the PS2), and the GPU in its emulation target (the Xbox), a "3.5"th generation nVidia GPU, is one generation ahead of the PS3's emulation target (the PS2), it seems the PS3 should be able to emulate the PS2 without breaking much of a sweat. I'm aware that these factors alone mean very little when you're talking about emulating a given hardware platform -- but there's plenty to be said for a brute force approach when all else fails.

Once again, I'm not sitting here trying to say the 360 is superior to the PS3! Please don't mistake me! I am simply stating facts that support a given viewpoint in relation to the questions I'm asking. Yes, I'm aware that the 360 has far fewer games to emulate than the PS3 would (although it seems that nobody's really upset at 90-95% backwards compatibility vs. 100% backwards compatibility; I'd be happy if the PS3 would at least make a stab at it and throw firmware updates on top of it to include more games as time goes on, rather than simply not doing it at all).

I often wonder whether the real culprit here could be Sony's historically negative opinion of emulation in general. Remember Bleem!? For those of you who may not recall, Bleem! was an ingenious piece of software that ran, initially, on the x86 platform (that is, on your PC running Windows), and could play nearly any PSone game inserted into the CD-ROM drive. It was NOT designed for piracy -- as designed, it would only play legitimate PSone discs. Sure, if you gave it a hacked PSone BIOS, it would play copies, but that wasn't really Bleem!'s fault -- it was emulating the PSone, and if the PSone could be hacked, so could any of its emulators. Basically, they represented a huge increase in Sony's software market -- more games sold. Later that same year, they released Bleem!cast, emulating PSone games on the Dreamcast.

Unfortunately, not very long afterwards Sony filed a lawsuit and Bleem! ceased and desisted, and despite other PSone emulators being developed since, Bleem! remains dead to this day.

Bleem!'s lead developer, however, was hired by Microsoft to lead the team that developed the 360's Xbox emulator.

It appears that Microsoft and Sony have very different atittudes towards emulation -- or at least HAD very different attitudes towards emulation -- and that may have worked against Sony with respect to this particular issue.

I have corresponded with PCSX2's developers, offering my support (both in terms of resources [$$$] and expertise, being a software developer with 12 years of industry experience myself, although not in gaming) for porting their emulation platform to Linux on the PS3 hardware platform. That is, proving to the world that the PS3 has the hardware to natively emulate games in high resolution by doing it in the open-source Linux world (now that Sony has legitimized Linux on their console) with PS3's hardware, which may motivate Sony to get it done in the PS3's OS as well, bringing to bear their own expertise instead of having to reverse engineer everything. The team does plan to move in this direction eventually, but they obviously need to bring a great deal more compatibility to the x86 version of the emulator before they can turn to Linux on the PS3 platform.

Anyway, I'm interested in thoughtful, informed discussion on this topic, as well as any legitimate information anyone may have from Sony themselves, in terms of when (if ever) we might expect native high resolution support of PS2 games on the PS3. I, for one, would buy a PS3 based on that ability alone, even if compatibility were only 15-20%. Even if I could play 15-20% of the incredible library of RPGs offered on the PS2 in high resolution, I would be more than happy, especially with a commitment to increase that figure as time and resources permit.

Thoughts? Please -- no flames.

-Birdbeast

sambomacho · #2 04-22-2008, 05:20 PM

Hi,

Firstly great 1st post mate.

Secondly, I have talked about this briefly in a couple threads and I totally agree with you, with all of the PS3 horsepower surely they could ramp up the Backwards compatibility. I have a 40Gb PS3 and I love it but I wish i could play at least a few PS2 games on it, and in response to your posts main point yes the up scaling should be better.

The problem is Microsoft is massive and has a lot more resources at their disposal than Sony. At the moment Sony are focusing on new games and new features such as home and in game XMB, rather than adding things like backwards compatibility to the 40Gb or improving the up scaling on other models. Maybe when things are all finished with the upcoming features then sony will sort it out if enough people email in requests for it.

Nevertell · #3 04-22-2008, 06:33 PM

Wow! That took along time to read. haha j/k great post Birdbeast.

I agree with alot of what you said. Even though I didn't really understand everything. What you say makes sense. I hope Sony will hear of this and make a change. Not a drastic one of course. This all seems rather simple to achieve. Perhaps they need to listen to their customers, and potential customers a little more. Personally, I like their products. However, they can always improve them in some way. I know they have alot of things in the works, but maybe they should cut back a little. Try focussing on one thing at a time ya know?

birdbeast · #4 04-22-2008, 06:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sambomacho

Hi,

Firstly great 1st post mate.

Secondly, I have talked about this briefly in a couple threads and I totally agree with you, with all of the PS3 horsepower surely they could ramp up the Backwards compatibility. I have a 40Gb PS3 and I love it but I wish i could play at least a few PS2 games on it, and in response to your posts main point yes the up scaling should be better.

The problem is Microsoft is massive and has a lot more resources at their disposal than Sony. At the moment Sony are focusing on new games and new features such as home and in game XMB, rather than adding things like backwards compatibility to the 40Gb or improving the up scaling on other models. Maybe when things are all finished with the upcoming features then sony will sort it out if enough people email in requests for it.

Thanks.

You bring up a good point -- Sony's focus definitely appears to be on other things, and I certainly don't claim to know their market like they do, since they've been in the business much longer than Microsoft.

I am definitely a 110% videophile geek, and I'm definitely ready to admit that the feature(s) which could sell the system to me is/are most likely NOT the feature(s) that would sell the system to your average consumer.

But from the standpoint of backwards compatibility, it seems Sony is decidedly unconcerned -- since they've actually removed the capability from the 40GB model, vs. both the 60GB and the 80GB models (is that correct? I forget) having BC compatability at launch.

But again, the way they've achieved backwards compatibility suggests to me a definite anti-emulation stance. Considering they actually threw the PS2 GPU (the "Emotion Engine") hardware into the launch PS3s to achieve backwards compatibility suggests that emulation either was not working out or they chose not to analyze it.

I know that the PS2 was known to be a difficult beast for which to develop compared to its competition. Perhaps the sheer variety of games (and the number of ways the PS2's hardware was stretched to do things it may not have been originally intended to do) is one reason emulation may not be worth pursuing. But then again, as I suggested in my original post, I wouldn't mind a 50% compatibility rate as long as the 50% included the popular games, and I tend to think that the larger developers responsible for the most popular games probably had more rapport with Sony, and as a result, probably coded in a fairly compatible style, meaning that emulation could target their games. Furthermore, games that were unconventional in their use of the PS2's graphics hardware would most likely benefit the LEAST from native HD graphics -- after all, only games making heavy use of 3D environments would benefit from native HD support. So Sony could take a two-prong approach and use their current solution for nonstandard games' backwards compatibility, and native high resolution emulation for those games which support it.

I don't know. I would be much more satisfied to swallow the official line ("It can't be done; the PS2 hardware was used in too many different manners") if I didn't see a high-resolution PS2 emulator running on the PC sitting right in front of me. *sigh*

I wonder if there are any emulator teams out there other than PCSX2 that might have plans for targetting Linux on the PS3 platform in the shorter term. Does anyone know?

Quinnster · #5 04-23-2008, 09:42 AM

i dont really see the point in why sony would bother what do they care there not going to make any money out of it its pointless theres probly a tiny percentage of people that wanna play ps2 i dont see the point most of the games that i like are on the ps3 already...face the facts play ps3 games on ur ps3 lol dont mean to be harsh lol

birdbeast · #6 04-23-2008, 02:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Quinnster

i dont really see the point in why sony would bother what do they care there not going to make any money out of it its pointless theres probly a tiny percentage of people that wanna play ps2 i dont see the point most of the games that i like are on the ps3 already...face the facts play ps3 games on ur ps3 lol dont mean to be harsh lol

Apologies, but this attitude seems somewhat ignorant to me. For those users who never owned a PS2, Sony could make a great value proposition to those customers by effectively giving the PS3 an existing library of 3,000+ games, all running in higher resolution (HD) natively, and thereby prettier than they will ever be on a PS2.

Which is to say, it could represent a great deal of money to them.

Of course, it may not represent *as much* money as the value-adds on which they are currently focusing... But, historically, Sony has always struggled for "bragging rights" among its competition, and right now, from the standpoint of backwards compatibility, they definitely have no bragging rights compared to the methods by which their competition is handling this issue.

Perhaps it's just not very high on their priority list.

I'm still interested to know if anyone has any information A) From Sony on this subject or B) Opinions about porting the PCSX2 emulator to Linux-on-PS3 or C) Information from teams planning to work on B).

Of course, all posts are welcome; everyone is entitled to their opinions -- just don't expect me to share them if they aren't supported by verifiable fact.

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