Can a software update make a 40gb PS3 play PS2 games?
- Thread starter Bengaboy
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I think the possibility is there. It'd have to be emulation I guess so might need to be done on a game to game basis?
Soldato
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I thought the 60GB PS3 had a hardware Emulation chip that was later removed in the 40GB PS3 so wouldn't that rule out and chance of BC in the 40GB?
No. Reason being is because im pretty sure the xbox 360 has no old tech in it, its all done by software emulation. Which is why I asked if the 40gb could potentially do it?
And if so....why doesnt sony do it??? Removing BC was stupid IMO, even if it was to cut costs
Yeah but doing that is pretty inefficient, your Intel C2D is much much faster than a arcade machine but it probably eats up considerbly more CPU cycles than you would expect (ie less than .5%) So doing emulation on the next gen console might cause game stutters.
It would need to use software emulation, which would probably be too slow to play games reasonably, whereas my 60g ps3 has the hardware to play the ps2 games properly
Your 60gig PS3 (if a UK model) will be using a mix of software and hardware emulation.
On the original US and JPN launch models of the PS3, the hardware included a combined version of the PS2 Emotion Engine (EE) and PS2 GSX (Graphics Synthesisor) to give full hardware support for running PS2 games.
In the UK launch consoles (60gig) and later revised US and JPN versions they removed the Emotion Engine but still retained the GSX in silicon for the PS2 graphics, with the Cell having to emulation the Emotion Engine through software.
Now, the 40gig UK consoles have had the GSX removed, and therefore no support at all for PS2 games.
The question is - can the PS3 fully emulate the PS2 in software? From a technical viewpoint I would lean towards 'no'. The Cell consists of a single PowerPC core and 8 small SPE cores (Synergistic Processing Units) - one of which is disabled, and another reserved for the system code. You will often see misleading info like "oh the PS3 has 8 cores!", but bear in mind that the SPE's are small RISC processors really geared towards number crunching with a very small local memory and they sit on a ring bus inside the processor which is slow to communicate to the outside resources, certainly no where near as versatile as the PowerPC core.
Firstly, we don't know how much of the Cell processor time and resources are required for the Emotion Engine emulation (in the 60gig PS3 which still has the GSX chip). With all the varied tasks required for emulation I would speculate that the SPE's aren't much use.
Comparing with the Xenon processor in the 360, which has three PowerPC cores in it's processor - with all cores having equal capabilities and access to the system resources - it's much more capable from a programming point of view for handling all the tasks involved in emulating all the systems of the original Xbox.
I would have thought getting an Xbox 360 to emulate an Xbox would be a much more simple task than emulating a PS2 on a PS3. I think they are conceptually more similar to each other than the PS2 and 3 are. Plus it could be the case that the GPU is for the most part backwards compatible anyway. That's just speculation though.
The Wii doesn't need any emulation or special hardware to play GC games. The two systems are basically identical except for faster clock speeds and a bit more memory. GC games natively run on the hardware.
The Wii doesn't need any emulation or special hardware to play GC games. The two systems are basically identical except for faster clock speeds and a bit more memory. GC games natively run on the hardware.
Caporegime
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No. Reason being is because im pretty sure the xbox 360 has no old tech in it, its all done by software emulation. Which is why I asked if the 40gb could potentially do it?
And if so....why doesnt sony do it??? Removing BC was stupid IMO, even if it was to cut costs
do you know how much space the emulation software takes up on a 360?
8 GB thats why when you format your 20GB hard disk it only shows up with 12GB
now for microsoft has probably the biggest team of software developers in the world - due to the size of windows Operating systems and office, etc
for sony to try and even attempt software emulation would cost them much more than putting a BC chip in
so i would say no, it will never happen due to costs of software emulation, although future ps3's may become available with BC chips, also another point to add is, ps2's can be bought second hand or new for next to nothing these days, i know this aint exactly a good solution but the problem in itself is very small
nobody bought a ps3 to play ps2 games, i have never played a ps2 game on my launch model (has BC chip)
i have never played an xbox game on my 360 apart from the one time we has a halo 2 meet one day and even then i only played for a few minutes
although i own a hell of a lot of xbox and ps2 games, they just lie there doing nothing and the money they are worth theres no point trading them - i just keep them as memento's - i personally dont see why BC is a problem and sony were right to exclude it to save money because they are taking a beating from microsoft, and are continuing to do so, you can tell their software development team are a joke if they have released firmware that kills ps3's - it has taken over 6 years and still no decent online system - they arent even capable of making software emulation even if they wanted to
the company has been poorly run by the japanese for a long time and they really need to stop being traditional and employ more americans/british/europeans that have experience to move the company forward and in line with its competitors
The actual emulation code itself uses very little space.
The 7GB that is reserved is to mimic the original XBOX hard drive - for cache space, and XBOX downloaded content.
Was just about to say the same thing. If it's even half as powerful as it's meant to be, emulating a PS2 in software should be a piece of cake.
The problem is (as I outlined in my first post earlier) is that it's not a general purpose CPU.
The 360 Xenon CPU is, it has three full PowerPC cores - each has equal access to the rest of the system, and makes splitting up tasks easier - as each core can get about doing any task given to it with no limitations.
With the Cell - it does have on paper about twice the computational power for raw number crunching than the 360 Xenon processor, but the design is not as straightforward. It has a single PowerPC core at it's heart, and 6 SPE's (8 in total - one redudant, and one reserved for the system). The SPE's are effectively fast RISC processor cores optimised for number crunching. Each has a very limited memory (256K), and sit on a slow ring bus, with limited and slow access to the rest of the system. Fine, they can crunch numbers as fast as you like - perfect for modern games that are written to use them specifically to whizz through calculations and vectors, but aren't really that good for more complex tasks, so in my eyes technically the Cell would be at major disadvantage for achieving full emulation of the PS2 with the single PowerPC core.