During that time the hardware (from the point of view of the developer) changed very little. The PlayStation 2 was Sony's main console for well over 6 years. I agree with what everyone else has said about software emulation, but I'll add that writing a game console emulator is very different from other emulation undertakings. Sony probably had to start up an entire team devoted to emulating the PS2 in software, and again it probably wasn't worth the return on investment so they shut it down. Not to mention that the bus system (how the chips are laid out and connected) is very different between the two systems. While certainly more deterministic than human-language translation, this is still a hard problem to solve especially when you only have the limited resources of a console (emulation often requires about 5x better hardware than the system being emulated did). As Shaun said, the reason it's hard is because the PS2 had different processors than the PS3, meaning everything had to be "translated" from PS2 instructions to PS3 instructions. Emulation is hard, especially for a sophisticated console like the PS2. And if it had, it wouldn't have increased PS3 game sales very much - and Sony wouldn't make any more money than they already had on the PS2 games people owned. This was probably a losing investment for them, since the PS2 part wasn't the main attraction it probably didn't increase PS3 sales very much. Basically Sony was having to pay for PS2 and PS3 hardware in manufacturing, and then selling it at the PS3's price. In addition to Shaun's very good answer, consider the cost of emulation.įirst, the PS3's with the extra hardware for running PS2 games. While the first PS2 models incorporated hardware of the PS1 (like its CPU), later PS2 models completely emulated the PS1 via software (and were thinner). In 2000, Sony bought a Playstation emulator called Virtual Game Station. PS1, being a system simpler and older than the PS2, is easier to emulate using only software. They also have a compatibility tool that you can use to see if specific games can play on those specific models. Sony has a knowledgebase article that explains which three versions can play PS2 games. Models since the MSG:IV bundle had neither the CPU nor the software emulation of the CPU required to play older games. It can still play most PS2 games, but support isn't as good as the earlier models with the actual EE CPU. The 80GB Metal Gear Solid IV bundle had the GPU as well, but replaced the Emotion Engine chip with software emulation of the chip. These models can play almost all PS2 games. This CPU/GPU combo was put in all PS2 units and in the first variants of the PS3 (the NTSC 20GB and 60GB models) to make them backward-compatible. PS2 games were created to work on Sony's Emotion Engine CPU and their Graphics Synthesizer GPU. They cannot run on the CPU designed for the PS3.
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