Um, PS3s backwards compatibility wasn't emulation. They physically installed the emotion engine PS2 hardware in the early PS3s. So if you want to figure out how much it'd cost to do that for the PS4, go look up how much a new PS3 currently costs and add about 3/4 of the price onto the cost of the PS4. That isn't a small development fee, that is a huge increase of the cost of each console. Software emulation is simply not possible to do on the PS4.
The Big Bad Console Thread - Sway your Station with an Xboner !
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Utnayan
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Obviously important enough for Sony to invest $380 million in a service designed to stream every backward compatible game in the Playstation library since initial PS One Launch.
Foggy
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$380 million is not a lot of money when your install base will be in the 10s of millions. As the install base increases Sony's costs will not. Whereas, putting $150 to $200 of PS3 hardware into the PS4 will let the costs grow with every single purchase. Just take 10 million PS4s, for example, assuming $150 loss per PS4 for PS3 BC (this won't cover PS2 and PS1, which Gaikai will). The cost of Gaikai will be $380 million whereas the cost of BC is $1.5 billion. Now move the number to 50 million units sold, Gaikai is still $380 million, but BC grew to $7.5 billion. It is a cost issue and streaming is a much cheaper and cleaner option.
The Gaikai tech they bought out is also not purely for streaming PS3 games either, they invested in it to use the shit they got in the deal for more than just that.
My memory is a bit vague, but if I remember correctly the PS3 backwards compatibility sucked ass compared to just hooking up your PS2. Games were slower and graphics had a fair amount of issues. Definitely wasn't worth whatever price it added to the console IMO.
Soygen
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The original PS3 had PS2 hardware. After the first year or so, though, the PS3 was doing PS2 emulation 100% through software and dropped the EE to save costs.
Utnayan
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spronk
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why are you guys even arguing with ut, his superior knowledge of how computers and video game systems work puts him at a level far above us mere mortals. for example most people say the ps3 emulator website he linked is simply a malware site that never actually runs an emulator but just spams your machine with trojans, but he knows the truth that a ps3 emulator is only a 7kb download.
thats all you need to emulate the ps3, man, fucking sony couldn't even spend the 15 minutes to include a 7 kb program to run all ps3 games
on a more serious note i do kinda wonder how gaikai works. do they have a bunch of PS3 blades that are streaming, or are they running a sony built ps3 emulator on really powerful PC servers? If its the latter, that could be interesting if the source ever gets out.
thats all you need to emulate the ps3, man, fucking sony couldn't even spend the 15 minutes to include a 7 kb program to run all ps3 games
on a more serious note i do kinda wonder how gaikai works. do they have a bunch of PS3 blades that are streaming, or are they running a sony built ps3 emulator on really powerful PC servers? If its the latter, that could be interesting if the source ever gets out.
This is a bit inaccurate. The first revision (the 80gb PS3s) emulated one of the chips, but kept the other one in; and it's emulation wasn't as reliable as the first round of PS3s.
Later on down the road, Sony took out the other PS2 chip, hence why any PS3s made for the last several years cannot emulate PS2 games.
The trouble with emulation goes far beyond just being a matter of horsepower, especially between systems with wildly different architecture. Emulating means having to translate code designed for one type of architecture (for the PS3 this means stuff that was designed for a ~3ghz processor with 7 SPEs etc), and in realtime have it running on an 8 core 1.6ghz chip trying to run it as if it was a Cell processor. And that includes having to emulate every bus, every pathway that data gets transferred, on a system that doesn't share the same kinds of pathways, and translating it fast enough to be able to render with a playable framerate.
It'd be like an English speaker having to read a speech in realtime with no pauses, with the speech written in Latin, by hiring a translator who only knows how to translate to English by translating to Spanish first.
Coren already posted why this is wrong, but it is also worth mentioning that when they half switched over to partly software, partly hardware emulation it was not 100% BC. A lot of games simply didn't work and they were some of the most well known titles from the biggest dev houses, because they pushed the hardware the hardest and tried to get the most of the specific architecture, which was no longer there. Then they dropped it entirely.
And the PS2 was nowhere near as complicated as the cell. Emulating the cell is a nightmare.
It would probably cost around 100 bucks to implement backwards compatibility on each console. When you consider the streaming service's overhead, the difference is likely insignificant.
Foggy
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The Wii U doesn't emulate Wii games - it boots into separate OS's and runs both off the same hardware. The Wii U and Wii hardware are similar architecturally - they both run off PowerPC processors, etc.
The PS4 and PS3 are completely different architectures - they would either need software emulation (which is impossible with the hardware the PS4 is running) or completely separate piece of hardware (a chip on the motherboard, for example) inside the box to run the PS3 games - which is what the launch PS3 did to run PS2 games, in combination with some software emulation - this was one of the factors in raising the price over $600 retail and $1000 for Sony to build.
Utnayan
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It cannot be that hard when a guy in a garage is doing it, and making a Mac version as well.
REDACTED VIRUS SITE
How is it impossible when the above emulator runs on a 3.0 Ghz C2D and 2 Megs of Ram.
spronk
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don't download anything off that site its a trojan/malware, and utnayan should be banned for trying to infect rerolled users
Tmac
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If you could stop being a retard and linking to a scam site, that'd be fantastic.
Foggy
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