PS3 80gb Backwardly Compatible???

ZXSpectrum

ZXSpectrum

ZXSpectrum

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Been doing a bit of searching around and there are many articles stating that the PS3 80Gb has limited backward compatability??? Is this just in the US? Wonderign if its going to be implemented across the board.. Its only software emulation so shouldnt be an issue.. I dont even mind paying a little for the option.

Anyone else with any info?
 
The US 80GB model had partial backwards compatibility just like the launch era 60GB European consoles.

The 80GB consoles in Europe now are the same hardware as the 40GB machines but with bigger hardware. Using HD size alone to try to determine model makes things confusing.

To summarise, in Europe, the only console with PS2 backwards compatibility is the launch era 60GB PS3. The 40GB, 80GB and 160GB machines do not have it - they only have PS1 backwards compatibility.
 
Why are we Europeans getting shafted with this though? I want a ps3 and browsing through wiki it appears not only that the 60gb is superior to the 80 and 180 gb due to the ps2 compat, but also has more usb ports and still has the flash reader. Why do the stupid monkeys of Sony had to strip a perfectly good ps3 version, the 60gb one, of it's great features?
 
to save costs. when i bought my 60gig on launch day it cost £425 but sales were slow so they cut features to reduce the retail price.

u cannot buy a new ps3 that can play ps2 games at all anymore even outside of the uk so nobody is getting shafted.
 
Mine cost me £545 at laucnh as I was forced to buy 3 games with it as well. Does upscale most PS2 games very well. Think the EU PS2 compatible model was the best PS3 ever made as it enabled more games to work due to its software & hardware approach whereas the NTSC US model was hardware only emulation based so some games did not work as well.
 
Yes it's not just us getting 'shafted' with it now. Sony don't sell any PS2 backwards compatible PS3s in any territory and it was trimmed, along with the USB ports and card reader, to save costs.

Seemingly they can't win - they try to cut costs by losing the features that in reality, the vast majority of people don't use anyway but then people still complain the PS3's too expensive. PS2s are so cheap these days that backwards compatibility should really not be a problem. They're also small enough for it not to take up any significant space by the TV ;)

AWPC said:
Mine cost me £545 at laucnh as I was forced to buy 3 games with it as well. Does upscale most PS2 games very well. Think the EU PS2 compatible model was the best PS3 ever made as it enabled more games to work due to its software & hardware approach whereas the NTSC US model was hardware only emulation based so some games did not work as well.
Click to expand...

Actually, the original Japanese and USA consoles were the best. They had both the PS2's CPU and GPU in so everything was hardware based - no emulation at all, the PS2's GPU and CPU (combined into one chip - EE+GS) was physically present inside the machine. The European 60GB model, and subsequently the USA 80GB model, had the PS2's CPU in but the GPU was emulated in software so that model is less compatible than the original Japanese/USA 60GB machines.
 
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Phemo said:
The European 60GB model, and subsequently the USA 80GB model, had the PS2's CPU in but the GPU was emulated in software so that model is less compatible than the original Japanese/USA 60GB machines.
Click to expand...

It was the other way around - the PS2's GSX (Graphics Synthesisor) was still present in silicon, and the Emotion Engine CPU was emulated.
 
Doesn't bother me in the slightest that my 80GB version lacks the backward compatability to play PS2 games. All it really means is that I have to press the button on the PS2 which sits on t'other side of the TV from the PS3.
 
Azagoth said:
Doesn't bother me in the slightest that my 80GB version lacks the backward compatability to play PS2 games. All it really means is that I have to press the button on the PS2 which sits on t'other side of the TV from the PS3.
Click to expand...

Indeed, its also worth noting that a slim PS2 costs about the same, if not less than the price difference between the 40gig and 60gig. I do miss the wireless controllers though D:
 
I'm talking about the 2nd hand market, where 60gb ( as do 40 and 80gb versions) ps3's regularly pop up for 280-300€, they're sold very quickly though when such offers pop up, usually within 24 hours... I don't have a ps2 so I want a ps3 that can handle ps2 games too... I don't find it worth buying something old when the successor can handle the same... New ps3 is rip-off imo compared to the 360, might as well spend far less and get a 360 elite and an xbox live gold thing... But I don't want the xbox360 as the exclusives do not interest me at all and I don't have any original xbox games I want to play while I'd love to play loads of ps2 games... And the 360 controller feels way too big for me, I prefer the dualshock/sinaxis :).

What I'm annoyed about is why they didn't continue selling a clearly superior model, so at least people have a choice, like with the 360 between arcade, premium and elite.

Whats actually more funny is that the playground version of pcsx2.0 plays 70% of all ps2 games fine, on pc... So they can't software emulate the ps2 on the mighty 8 core cell, yet a simple core 2 duo does it fine ?
 
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The thing is, it wasn't possible for Sony to continue with the 60gig models. It cost too much to build and, despite selling at a loss, was still too expensive for consumers. The introduction of the 40gig, which has the same feature set as the 80gig, saw a huge boost in PS3 sales and could well have been the decision that saved the PS3 from being the next Atari Jaguar.

While the 60gig was clearly a better product, it just wasn't a feasible purchase for most and to keep it in production was costing Sony insane sums of money. The only differences between the 360 SKUs as far as i can tell is harddrive size, colour and peripherals, the 60gig was a completely different piece of hardware.
 
snowdog said:
Whats actually more funny is that the playground version of pcsx2.0 plays 70% of all ps2 games fine, on pc... So they can't software emulate the ps2 on the mighty 8 core cell, yet a simple core 2 duo does it fine ?
Click to expand...

It's not all that mighty for emulation due to the Cell having totally different archetecture...

Take the 2 core x86 processors such as teh core 2 duo - two full processor cores, both have equal access to outside resources. Likewise, the 360 with it's triple core PowerPC processor - far better suited as each core is not limited in anyway as to what it can do.

On the other hand, the Cell has 1 full processor CPU core which is a PowerPC based core, plus 8 small DSP cores (SPE - Synergistic Processing Elements) and out of these eight 1 is disabled, and 1 reserved for the core OS use only. The SPE cores sit on a ring bus, have only a very limited amount of local memory (256K) and have to communicate through the PowerPC core - they really are just very, very fast number crunching cores - not general purpose CPUs.
 
The PS3 is more than capable of emulating PS2 games i'm sure of it. The problem is Sony is not capable of making the software to do so. They lack the staff time and money for a project that no one would actually pay for.
 
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