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We've moved past the necessity for distinct console generations, at this point it's almost pure planned obsolescence.
Which is why PC is becoming more and more popular. There's literally no reason to own a console anymore - the only exception is the Switch, and only because Nintendo have such solid exclusives and because they keep fucking around with weird ideas for their consoles.
My switch has gotten more use the past three years than my PS4. I think I might just be old but 99% of the time I'd rather just jump around in a cartoony nintendo title than any of the more realistic looking titles I own for my playstation.
I mean, hell: You can get a GPD Win and basically have an emulation box + PC titles (though downgrading/LowSpecGamer a lot of modern titles) on the go.
How can this be true? A video game console is a stable hardware target for games developers. Even as the manufacturer “upgrades” the console the ABI remains the same, such that you can play the same games on an original or improved ps4, for example.
If games consoles were like normal desktop PCs you couldn’t certify them to work correctly on the console and everyone would have unique, “well it works on my PlayStation” issues.
Oh, for sure. It's all proprietary, locked down BS. And now that game consoles are also subscription services and ad platforms, it's an especially sorry situation. I've made my exit from AAA gaming and haven't purchased a console since my PS Vita at launch. Coincidentally, my Vita has become 100x cooler and more useful ever since you could install custom firmware. The possibilities are amazing when you're not restricted by a company's proprietary shit telling you no.
Those are brought by a recompilation process almost like porting rather than full system emulator. This is why not the entire library is available.
Sony could do this too but they do not.
Technically, they (Sony) have done that with the original Playstation. POPS (PlayStation One Portable Station) is their software emulator. When the PSP was hacked people were able to inject PSX titles to it, but it wasn't 100% perfect. Some titles couldn't load due to multi-disc (which Sony implemented later for FF7, 8, 9 and MGS), or just couldn't load at all due to not being programmed for the particular emulator calls.
PS2 and 3 could probably do that, but it's a MONUMENTAL task to do.
There are 'good' reasons, or at least technical ones that make it difficult.
Let's start by talking about PC. PCs run on the x86 architecture and have done so since a little bit after 1981. There have been extensions to the x86 instruction set but they've all preserved backward compatibility. That's why we've never needed a PC2*. You may be familiar with x86-64, sometimes referred to as x64 or amd64. That was when the x86 instruction set was updated from 32-bit to 64-bit. It's all x86 and compatible though.
I should probably explain what an architecture is. An architecture or 'instruction set architecture' is the lowest level of programming language. This is the part that actually tells the CPU how to run (and interact with the RAM, but not the GPU for PCs). Different kinds of CPUs need different instruction sets because the CPUs are different on the inside. The most popular architectures are x86 (for PCs) and ARM (for your smartphones), ARM is optimized for battery life over performance and you'll notice that you can't install smartphone 'apps' on your computer and can't install computer 'apps' on your phoe.
Architectures are named weird because we they're only important to computer people and we let computer people name them.
So let's get on to the Playstations, here are their architectures.
- PS1: MIPS
- PS2: MIPS-III
- PS3: PowerPC. Also used a weird Cell processor.
- PS4: x86
- PS5: x86
Now let's look at backwards compatibility. PS2 was backwards compatible with PS1. PS5 is backwards compatible with PS4. Early PS3 were backwards compatible with PS2, but that's only because those PS3 had a PS2 chip inside of it specifically for this. Nothing is compatible with the PS3. So backwards compatibility is there for Playstations with the same architecture.
Xbox also exists. Xbox1 was x86, as was
Xbox2Xbox3, and now Xbox4. This is why Xbox has an easier time with both backwards compatibility and porting to PC. Edit: Xbox2 was actually PowerPC. I guess this also means the Xbox was just better at porting due to their experience with Windows.Nintendo also exists.
There are solutions to architecture incompatibility. Option 1 is emulation, as you might be familiar with from PC gaming. You run an entire virtual system on your computer, then on that virtual system you run your game. It's hardware intensive but luckily hardware has vastly improved since then. Option 2 is porting or recompilation, you rewrite large chucks of the lower code of the game to make it work on a different system, this is programmer (and tester) intensive. It's just as hard to port from PS3 to PS5 as it is from PS3 to PC, the only advantages Sony has is their knowledge of the PS3/PS5 and their direct access to source code of the games (or at least some of the games).
There are weirder options, like partial emulation or the PS3 option of just putting an entire fucking PS2 inside the PS3. There's also ways to make doing this stuff easier with interoperability layers (like our dear friend DirectX). There's also remote play, which uses "The Cloud" to run your game on an old console somewhere else and then stream it to you.
*We technically have had PC2 at some point during the PC wars. I don't know what iteration we reached before the IBM PC and it's clones was created. It depends on what you consider to be the first PC.
There are other reasons too! Including pure capitalism and business reasons. However, the architecture thing is a big deal in terms of being a real practical obstacle to backwards comparability. There are other practical obstacles as well.
Conclusion: For the use of corporate closed hardware systems you have been tried and convicted of counterrevolutionary acts. You are hereby sentenced to 10 years hard labor in the code mines. You will be given a chance to better yourself and provide for those that have embraced open(er)-platform gaming.
You will be given a chance to better yourself and provide for those that have embraced open(er)-platform gaming.
Any action that does not promote RISC-V on a wide scale should be deemed counterrevolutionary. Any action that promotes ARM to defeat x86 hegemony can be considered an intermediate revolutionary step.
Nintendo also exists.
the wii u was backwards compatible all the way to the gamecube, and the 3ds all the way to the original ds, cut em some slack
I know they had good backwards compatibility recently. I just didn't know much about their technical specifics and didn't feel like researching all the way back to the NES. I just put that to note that I didn't forget about them, I just ignored them. Unlike Sega who I first forgot and then ignored.
You're correct, I fixed that up there. I forgot they left x86 for the Xbox 360 and then went back. I also changed PS3 to PowerPC since I think this was before it was renamed/updated to Power ISA.
the reason that is usually touted is that good software emulation can be difficult to do, especially when the console they are emulating has weird proprietary hardware, like the PS2 "emotion engine" (which is why ground textures flicker like a motherfucker in Ace Combat 5 on ps2 emulators) and putting the actual hardware in the console takes up a lot of space and costs money.
but all that said, i want to play my fucking games without paying you over and over and over and over again
PS2 have two slightly different custom vector coprocessor connected to the other processing hardware directly, and many asynchronous bus. It is very complicated.
Article:
https://www.copetti.org/projects/consoles/playstation-2/
Do what I do and carry the burden of past systems on your back every time you move. I never got rid of my childhood consoles so I play on original hardware for the most part.
The boxes are very fucking heavy though.
Free McBoot and Ethernet adapter for PS2 lets you play games over ethernet from your PC. It's pretty great.
Well the original PS3 was backward compatible with PS2 games, and it did this by literally containing a PS2 inside the case.
Haven't they been used for massive parrellel processing for simulations and also for, like, weapons guidance systems?
That was the PS3, its Cell processor was really cost efficient for massively parallel workloads until general purpose GPU computing took over https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)
Closed source games don't allow recompilation for old systems <----- this
Once in a while I remember they lost the source for one of the final fantasy games and cry-laugh. They had to rewrite it from scratch for the remake.
Closed source is a library of alexandria burning down every month.
You can jailbreak superslim ps3s with the sliding door disc cover now. Source, I'm playing PS2 games on a superslim PS3 right now
Same reason they removed the ability to install your own OS on the PS3.
Every minute you're playing an old game you already own or doing something otherwise not profitable to Sony, you're not buying new games.
The Microsoft approach is very interesting. The games are not actually compatible, but are instead recompiled for the new machine with the compatibility library.
This means that they can work better, but code must be downloaded to the console for the game.
Dynamic recompilation of CPU code in emulation is a bit different because more of machine's state must be emulated, as the emulator is translating compiled machine code from one machine to another. The Microsoft approach requires the original source code and produces native machine code for the new machine, which means less work for emulator.
Microsoft required it in the developer license. They do not own the code but get a copy and can use it for purposes like this. I do not know for Sony but one of the license is here:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/946581/000162828017005833/ex10-48.htm
That's very cool, imagine what we could do if only we had a public source code repository for every piece of software.
That's mostly because Konami (#FucKonami, BTW) lost the source-code for the final release and only had a "beta" copy, from what I remember.
Japan (and America, I guess) in the 90's-00's would totally toss out hardware and drives without archiving. It's why the "Archiving of Video Games" is so important but getting stomped on by EULA's and DRM.
It's so ridiculous that PS5 doesn't have a PS1 and PS2 emulator with disc and previous digital purchase support. Sony got a really good PS1 emulator working on the fucking PSP. There's obviously no technical limitation (I get that there might be for PS3). It sucks. I've got my old Champions of Norrath and Timesplitters PS2 disks desperate to get played. And I no longer have my PS1 disks, but I bought like 25 PS1 games digitally for my PSP, PS3, and Vita; those purchases transferred across those systems without any issue (for the most part) and now they're just thrown out. I miss the glory days of the PS3 where I could play any PlayStation game on one system, where I got to fuck with a digital multitap.
Exactly, they could probably get a PS1 emulator that can internally upscale games to like 8k 120fps running on PS5, but at the very least just a basic, no-frills emulator would not be a challenge for them.
If you have the money you could get a second hand PS3, any model of PS3 can play PS1 disc games with a bit of anti aliasing (called ps smoothing) and in full screen or 4:3. If you jailbreak it (it's possible to jailbreak all ps3s now I think) you can play your own PS1 and PS2 isos and all. If you have a PC PS1 emulaton should be very doable, I play PS1 games on my phone sometimes.
Yeah I love emulation, my potato pc isn't powerful enough to run PCSX2, but I use my jailbroken PS3 for PS2 emulation. My PC and phone both have the PS1 emulator and dolphin emulator on them, as well as PPSSPP, and that's a ton of fun. My phone sometimes emulates games better than my PC lol, but it's fun to play need for speed underground 2 on my phone while waiting for the bus or something.
There is definitely a PS1 emulator (as well as PSP and PS2 emulator) on the PS5 in order to play playstation classics (old PS1, PS2 and PSP games available for digital purchase on the playstation store). It just isn't unlocked for the user to do what they want with it for a ton of reasons I explained in another comment. Also the official Sony PSP emulator hasn't been worked on in a while, they only configure it to work for a few games, look at the sad state of these lists:
https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps4/PSP_Emulator_Compatibility_Listhttps://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/PSP_Emulator_Compatibility_List
Isn't the PS1 emulator actually running inside the PSP emulator?
Yes, it does on Vita.
The Vita system only does partial emulation of the PSP as there is a MIPS R4k CPU like the PSP auxiliary on the Vita system.
The PS3 system does not.
Not on the PS3 or PS4 as far as I'm aware, that could be the case for the vita
I do appreciate good PS4 BC on PS5, at least (if I'm ever able to get one)
Fuck, why not even have a PSP emulator, too? Vita could be weird with the touch screen + back panel but plenty of games on there would also work - there was a home console version of the system, after all.
There are ways to get around the touchscreen issue. There are a lot of games for the WiiU that depended on having the second screen on the gamepad that were able to be ported to the Switch with minimal difficulty.
On that note, everyone go play The Wonderful 101
Yeah even as I said I remembered the PSTV, which was a Vita that used a DS3 and a TV, so Sony already got around it.
I'm confident Sony could get one working given that they designed the system. Mark Cerny could do it himself if he had the time.
I suppose I'm honestly surprised it's not a profitable revenue stream, selling classic games.
There are hardware reasons for why a ps5 wouldn't be able to use a ps3, 2, or 1 game. You'd need a whole separate set of disk readers for that and optical drives as well. Ps4 disks hardly have anything on them other than a drm unlock code so that's just bullshit goin on right there.
Blu Ray drives can read CD-ROM and DVD-ROM disk, which is what previous consoles use. There is a special copy protection behavior, but PS3 drive firmware incorporates this, and so it is very possible.
Actually, they can't! The laser assembly is completely different between CD, DVD, and BD. You probably concluded this because popular bluray drives on the market also include the hardware to read other kinds of disks. The disk drive Sony uses in the PS5 supports BD and DVD, but not CD.
This was a choice by Sony as nearly all commercial drive have both. Usually DVD and CD optic are combined as one unit as well. Do combination BD/DVD optic exist? Otherwise I do not understand a reason to not use a combined CD/DVD unit.
All I know is the PS4 and PS5 can play DVD movies, but will reject audio CDs. Perhaps it's some kind of licensing issue.
Red book CD-ROM audio does not require license to play, so I am not sure. Looking at a photo of the assembly it looks like there are one lens on some unit and two lens on other, so it must be a BD/DVD combination unit from some supplier and separate from other.
The ps5 definitely does have a PS1 and PS2 software emulator on it, otherwise the playstation classics wouldn't work. It's the same story for the PS3 and PS4, they both have PS1 and PS2 emulators. It just isn't enabled for the user to use for their own disc games for multiple reasons. The first is obviously that Sony want to make money reselling your old games on the playstation store as PS classics. The second would be the insane amount of testing required to ensure all the games work. As someone that has "unlocked" the PS2 emulator on my PS3 and PS4, there are a ton of weird quirks with regards to configuration and all that.
As for PS3 emulation, Sony would've had to create one from scratch (they have had PS1 and PS2 emulaton since the PS3, so they don't have to start over every time) and due to the complexity of the hardware of the PS3 it would be quite a task. PS4 emulation is there oviously, because the hardware is similar so it's a relatively small investment for a massive reward financially in terms of profit. The launch PS3 tried what you said (full backwards compatibility with all previous consoles, including disc games) and it was considered a massive flop as it was too expensive and not profitable. So to answer your question, capitalism, in many different ways.
There is a PS3 emulator and it's making pretty good progress, but you need a beast machine to run it.
Yeah but Sony don't have the rights to that specific emulator, they would have to make their own. I'm sure if Sony really wanted to they could make a PS3 emulator on PS5, this is the same company that got a PS2 software emulator to work on the PS3, a console with 512MB RAM and essentially a GT 8800 for a GPU, in order to resell PS2 games digitally on the playstation store. It's just they know there's more money in remakes and remasters (see Demon Souls on PS5) so they won't do it. :-(
There are actually hardware implications of parallelism of Cell that make it very expensive to emulate, more even than PS2. It was a mistake to use a scientific computing CPU on a game machine.
Sony could use rpcs3, as it is GPL licensed, but they would have to publish any change. There is room for performance improvements in that emulator, but it is going to always be difficult to run.
It was a mistake to use a scientific computing CPU on a game machine.
It did have a few benefits, look at games like the last of us and gran turismo 6, they look a lot better than what was available on Xbox 360 at the time. But there were a ton of downsides too.
but they would have to publish any change.
This is why Sony would never do such a thing, this is the company that still keeps PS2 documentation secret.
