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How is it difficult for Sony to have full BC with PS1 & PS2 games, yet Microsoft can have BC with OG Xbox & Xbox 360 games?
- Thread starter SpaceCrystal
- Start date
desperate panic response, lmao.
This post comes off with a lot more transparent of your mentality than you probably intended.
At least Google the subject material before inserting foot to mouth, smh
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Of course it "can", but Sony didn't pay the license so it can read CD-ROMS and I don't see why they'd suddenly pay one for every console sold now.
It's a great feauture and very consumer friendly. How much people use it varies of course and it also depends on how its handled and how dated the games are. The Last of Us 2 remaster proves people will embrace them, same with all the WiiU games that got ported to the Switch.
After the PS3 came out Sony had a different direction and BC became an afterthought. That's the trouble when you make proprietary hardfware like Emotion engines and the Cell. Microsoft on the other hand took the bull by the horns and did the extra work.
Wasn't Sony involved with creating CD? Seems weird that the company who led the charge with CD and DVD and bluray would all of the sudden worry about license fees.
After the PS3 came out Sony had a different direction and BC became an afterthought. That's the trouble when you make proprietary hardfware like Emotion engines and the Cell. Microsoft on the other hand took the bull by the horns and did the extra work.
Wasn't Sony involved with creating CD? Seems weird that the company who led the charge with CD and DVD and bluray would all of the sudden worry about license fees.
I think people would also be perfectly fine if Sony were able to just get a good percentage of titles as well. If its not a hardware solution, I think most reasonable people would be understanding.
This is the answer to the OP's question.
Feel free to criticize them for doing so.
True.
As far as their implementation of PS2 games, I'm still waiting for Max Payne 2 that was ESRB-rated and good to go. I'd love to know how that was cut short, whether it was Rockstar or Sony that pulled the plug.
Yes they were apart of the original consortium that designed the CD-ROM standard.
And yes it's really weird that its playback functionality is currently missing in their 4th generation console. My only guess is they no longer wanted to pay whatever fee it costed.
It's been 7 years, and the majority of consumers didn't notice or didn't care, so good on them.
You also have to look at it from another angle, some will always come to Sony's defense (but word it in such a way that it makes sense for Sony) whether it be about not attending E3 or blocking crossplay with other consoles. Then there is the other side of the coin that will go after them for everything.
Once you take out both of those extreme views you will notice the forums are a much nicer place to be without the console warrioring. The fact is BC is a great approach to being consumer friendly. It's a huge feature on the PC and I am very happy with Microsoft taking it the most seriously of all the consoles, just like the direction they did with talkiing about Cyberpunk 2077.
There is some great stuff coming starting this month, but the first two months were pretty dry. Some BC would have fit in really nicely.
No, and that's one of the biggest problems here. If Sony had implemented that feature, then a large number of the complaints would have vanished.
Even more telling is that they didn't allow customers to take previously purchased "PS2 Classics for PS3" and carry them over to PS4. If the same PS2 game was made available for PS4, then you would have to repurchase the game on PS4 in order to play it on that system. This was utterly atrocious, and conflicts with their otherwise consumer-friendly cross-buy policies of the past.
I like trophies too, but I would have preferred to have a large number of games playable at no extra cost.
As we already know, much of the complications came from Sony requiring developers to invest time and resources to add the trophies. If Sony made the addition of trophies optional instead of mandatory, then many more developers and publishers would have brought their games over.
Good post.
BC is somewhat partially implemented at the hardware level (just like it was on 360) if I remember the explanation from the BC team, so it was already planned before the Xbox One even shipped, and I'm guessing the same planning has gone into Xbox Series X design.
So no, it wasn't a rushed and desperate decision, it was always part of the plan.
I'm mostly talking about software emulation for really different architecture. I feel like Sony can pull off ps3 emulation if they had Microsoft's back compat team.
Imo, the problem is that older hardware (especially ones with disc drives) break over time and it becomes a real burden to find functioning consoles or having to mod them and pay exorbitant prices for it (like I have recently discovered for modding an N64 to support modern TVs).
PC doesn't have that problem, but I think it's the responsibility of the platform holders to offer some form of B.C. so that older games are playable with the original discs, or at least that you have some way of buying them digitally. It should be easy enough to implement for a big corporation like Sony, brings goodwill the the brand, and preserves older games so that new generations can play them. Plus imo it's easy money for them. Just gotta make sure that your purchases follow you. If all my PS1 purchases on PS3 would follow me, I might not be against the idea of getting a PS5 at some point so I could keep building my collection.
Sony might've been able to accomplish PS3 emulation on X86 architecture and PS4's fixed specs with their own team of engineers and documentation, if they dedicated the amount of time, effort, and money into it that MS had.
It doesn't even make sense, Sony was even part of the One-Red licensing model (along with Phillips, Pioneer and LG iirc) that covered blanket licensing for all CD and DVD formats.
I don't like 360 BC methods, some many games do not working due to licence issue (PGR4, DOA4, DOA2 Ultimate) + needed downloaded to play it.
But Enhanced on X is a very good thing.
But Enhanced on X is a very good thing.
If the PS2 games on PS4 tell me, should be the thropies. Imho they should rid them for the older games.
I mean , hobbyists can pull of PS3 emulation without access to actual documentation, so I'm sure Sony could.
So glad this was the first response. I imagine none of the issues regarding backwards compatibility are hardware/software related.
Such a glass half empty outlook LOL
From a glass half full outlook, so many games ARE working inspite of the publishing, licensing, streaming issues and starting from this generation on forward, all games will have to be installed and played on the hard drive. Downloading it is necessary due to each bc game being fine tuned in individual emulator wrappers.
Microsoft is several tiers above Sonys software engineering capacity. There are probably less than 10 companies in the world that even close to compare. That means little side projects in the grand scheme of the org like BC get resources other companies couldn't match.
Given that the PSX came out more than 20 years ago, any patents involved in reading its discs have expired by now.
I'm not even sure what they'd license. The patents are all expired, so all that's left is the CD audio logo which I'm pretty sure isn't required to make a device that reads CDs (that's where the patents come in). It's more of a marketing thing so consumers know what is compatible, iirc the CD group even made some music labels remove the CD logo from some albums that had bad DRM.
Sony was desperately pushing their own music streaming service when the PS4 launched, so I get why they wouldn't admit to being able to read CDs then (as bad as a reason it is, it at least makes sense), but I don't know why they're persisting after the deal with Spotify. Maybe Spotify has to pay a different fee structure if it goes on something that can play CDs, I don't know. Something dumb is going on.
BC is super important to me as a gamer as I tend to resonate more with older titles just as much as current ones. I applaud Microsoft on their efforts, and respect of their back catalog. This is why, ultimately, both Xbox and Steam will remain my platforms of choice moving forward.
The same difficulty Nintendo has on the switch. It costs money, better spent on making new games for the new hardware. Would be great to have both, but considering both Nintendo and Sony first party vs MS i think they priorities were spot on this generation.
Maybe I'm leaping here but I bet that bc team could pull off ps3 on ps4 emulation.
Well, PS1 Classics were already a thing on PSP/PS3 and those PSP games available digitally were already there back on PSP. So it wasn't done well, it was just normal for those to be BC back then ! :P
Microsoft is essentially a software company at its heart and has tons of programmers at its disposal to enable full BC with OG Xbox and Xbox 360, whereas Sony is a conglomerate which is involved in many different businesses and doesn't have the manpower to enable full BC with every one of its Playstation systems released to date.
Unlikely. PS4 isn't nearly powerful enough to emulate Cell. And rewriting the Cell code for Jaguars would be a lot more complex than you'd think. PS5 should be capable though.
We have no idea if the PS4 isn't powerful enough to emulate Cell because Sony didn't organize a team of engineers and give them the time, effort, and money like MS did to find out.
People assumed Xbox One wasn't powerful enough to emulate Xbox 360 and yet it happened.
And yet they crank out hardware. Their BC team is tiny.
We have a fairly good idea actually since we know the specs of both Cell and PS4's version of Jaguar CPU.
With PS3 the problem always was in emulating Cell SPU's which is a very difficult task even for modern desktop CPUs.
Also Xbox One doesn't emulate 360, it uses recompiled binaries. The obvious difference here is that it's a lot easier to fit the PPC code made for 3C/6T IOE CPU onto an x86 8C/8T OOOE CPU than do the same with Cell's SPUs.
Emulation on PC tells us nothing because it's done by hobbyists with no documentation of the hardware who do it on their free time. By your logic, PS3 emulation has got to be easier then because it's far more developed on PC than Xbox 360 emulation. LOL
The Xbox 360 also used a PowerPC processor in Xenon and the PS3 used a PowerPC processor in Cell and MS was capable of doing it on Xbox One's version of Jaguar CPU.
You have no idea whether it would've been possible for Sony to do PS3 emulation on PS4 because once again they didn't organize a team of engineers who have documentation of PS3 hardware and give them the time, effort, or money to find out like MS did with their BC team.
So quit saying nonsense like we have a fairly good idea when we don't.
it is 100% greed
sony have ps1 and ps2 emulaters working on the PS4 - they choose to only allow remakes/ remasters
itssucks
sony have ps1 and ps2 emulaters working on the PS4 - they choose to only allow remakes/ remasters
itssucks
On top of it being something that takes time and resources to do properly there is also market research that says it's generally something people say they want and then rarely use.
depends entirely on the standards sony have regarding BC.
do they want every title playable from disc?
do they want every title upressed?
do they want every title with trophy support?
do they want to be able to sell all games digitally on their storefront?
personally i don't see much point in BC if i can't just put the game in my PS5 and it works. and with the minefield of licensing and these console manufacturers wanting to make money from the process, the MS approach will never support everything.
i hope if sony have added BC to PS5 it's as simple as putting in any game and it emulating it. they can sell the games that they have licensing to sell on PSN, but it shouldn't prevent you from playing any game that you own.
do they want every title playable from disc?
do they want every title upressed?
do they want every title with trophy support?
do they want to be able to sell all games digitally on their storefront?
personally i don't see much point in BC if i can't just put the game in my PS5 and it works. and with the minefield of licensing and these console manufacturers wanting to make money from the process, the MS approach will never support everything.
i hope if sony have added BC to PS5 it's as simple as putting in any game and it emulating it. they can sell the games that they have licensing to sell on PSN, but it shouldn't prevent you from playing any game that you own.
I play spies vs mercenaries in splinter cell chaos theory and double agent on my 1X about as much as I play current gen games online. And they look gorgeous with the enhancements. Not even mentioning all the single player games I've replayed I can't thank Microsoft enough for giving us backwards compatibility and making so many games look and run better. Hopefully both new consoles can do even better than Xbox did this gen.
Exactly this. I dont even care for resolution bumps really either, I just want to be able to stick the disc in, and have the game run as it was in a 1080p/4K frame and integer scaled (with options for other scaling methods). All those games with licensed tracks wont be coming back so it will be the only way to play them.
It tells us a lot.
This is more a question of desire than technical difficulty. Most 360 games are on PC already so there's less desire to emulate it. 360 emulation on modern PC is immensely less difficult than PS3 emulation though.
PowerPC core isn't the issue, SPUs are.
Okay.
It's actually pretty clear that it's you who doesn't have any idea about this.
Yes, it's pretty clear. We don't know whether PS3 emulation would've been possible on PS4. Yet somehow you know.
I don't think there's anything technical stopping them.
It's more about money. For them it does not make economic sense, so they are not doing it.
It's more about money. For them it does not make economic sense, so they are not doing it.
It's not difficult at all. Sony isn't doing it because it doesn't generate $$$ and apparently some people are fine with that.
Boggles my mind tbh.
Boggles my mind tbh.
Nintendo faces unique challenges regarding interface and media making direct BC on Switch a lot more challenging than it would've been for PS4 or XBO. Not that they couldn't be doing more with their own retro catalog but they are doing something now at least with NES & SNES on their NSO sub.
I don't agree with the notion of BC/retro or new 1st party being a zero sum game though. Not really how it works.
We had 3 months, I used it to play a lot of older and great games.
It's pretty obvious, so i don't know why you act like no one could know.
Once again Sony didn't organize a team of engineers along with PS3 hardware documentation and give them years to figure it out like MS did. The reality is I don't know, but nobody else on this forum knows either. Would it have been very difficult? Sure. Could it have been impossible to do it on PS4 Hardware? Sure. My point is the planning and effort was never put in to really find out one way or the other. Yet you constantly have people on this forum definitively state that it was impossible based on very little evidence.