Sony Patents Method To Emulate PS2 On PS3

This guy's an idiot. The PS3 had TWO chips inside it in North America. That gave it full compat. The PS3 that had software emulation still had ONE chip in it, and the other was emulated. Sony then took out both chips completely.

They have to emulate the graphics chip, which is the part that isn't emulated on any existing PS3. I don't think they can do it because of performance issues.

^Thank you. People who don't actually know what they are talking about should be banned from writing technical articles.

The graphics chip in the PS2 wasn't really that powerful. I'd be willing to bet that any performance issues that they are having is due more to tyring to emulate both chips at the same time (a number of PC emulator teams have found that the Emotion Engine in particular has been a real pain to emulate well).

The original PS3 did have the hardware chips to facilitate PS2 playability because a pure software approach was feasible but due to the huge learning and design curve plus the lack of a decent compiler and development tools forced an initial hardware approach. The original SDK was just above the original IBM research kit for the cell processors just coupled with flaky PS3 lib routines; not ready for anything but lab freaks.

But after so many years, true creative developers and tools are coming on-line. Hopefully it's not too late for the PS3 and Sony will not dump on them for the "PS4"...okay developers start all over again. Great hardware but terrible development software support; MS could have really helped them. ;)