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Sony ‘could be working’ to bring proper PS3 game emulation to PS5

Rest

All these years later I still chuckle at what a fucking moron that guy is.
Remember Skyrim? Probably one of the worst disasters I've ever experienced. Only on PS3.
Skyrim did okay for me on PS3, except for one overworld cell that would freeze the game if I tried to enter it.
 
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Mahavastu

Member
Then there really is nothing that can be done to to play these older games.
If people are able to run pirated versions then Sony just has to patch the security loopholes with updates and maintain the features correctly. we are living in a time where you have to be online to download updates for a game and be connected online for most of the stuff. this isn't like the PS3-360 era.

The past has shown: if people use this feature and know that an OS upgrade would kill this feature, they just won't upgrade. That's how the world works and that's the reality Sony has to live with.
Realistically, I feel homebrew is a solution for proper backwards compatibility.

Yes, but one only very few people would use. As you wrote, most people will upgrade the OS to stay up2date.

it would be a miracle if Sony officially allowed proper backwards compat support but we can't expect a miracle of that sort.
Why would Sony not allow proper backwards compatibility?
They now do it for PS1/PS2/PS4/PSP with the new PS+, but I guess it will also play at least the games purchased digitally. I see no reason why Sony should not allow it once it is ready for PS3. If that day will ever come...
 

Mr Hyde

Member
Skyrim did okay for me on PS3, except for one overworld cell that would freeze the game if I tried to enter it.

Almost unplayable for me 😢 and it was such a shame because I loved it. It was until PS4 I finished it. And I later bought it for Switch too.
 

Kerotan

Member
I'd much rather they just remaster the best PS3 exclusives. Motorstorm trilogy, resistance trilogy, mgs4, God of war Ascension. R* needs to remaster GTA 4. There's a few others but a lot of the top PS3 exclusives already got PS4 ports or remasters. Infamous 1 and 2. Ratchet future trilogy. They don't need a full emulator.
 

Elysion

Banned
I could see them including hardware emulation (not only of PS3, but all previous PS gens) in a PS5 pro model as a selling point. If they still intend to release a pro model at some point, they need a new feature to get people who already have a PS5 to buy it. I‘m not sure if "full 4k without compromises" would be enough in this regard, since "4k" was already a selling point for the PS4 pro (even if it had few games that actually were native 4k).
 

ReBurn

Gold Member
The main reason for Open Source is, that Sony would not have to buy anything and could "just use it".
Anyway, the PS3 Emulator is under GPL2, which means Sony would have to publish the source code for anything they add to it, which might not what they want to do. So maybe Sony prefers to either throw out some millions or do their own emulator themself.
that's why I said they should pay the open source guys to make it
 

ManaByte

Member
Here’s the thing. The PS Now server hardware uses actual PS3 Cell hardware. IBM no longer produces those chips. Eventually that server hardware will fail and need to be replaced. Sony will have to figure out an emulator solution if they want to continue to charge people to play PS3 games.
 

GHound

Member
Sony could be working on its plot to take over the underwear drawer of an 87 year old Englishman.
What the worm doin'?
 

TheInfamousKira

Reseterror Resettler
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The more I think about, PS3 is the worst console Sony has put out. It's just crappy hardware all around, with few developers capable of harnessing its full potential. Crazy Ken fucked up big time with PS3.
Ken was a genius, and Cell was brilliant. Ps3’s hardware fauts can be chalked up to bad business.

Such as Nvidia misleading Sony into thinking their design was superior… and as most of us enthusiasts know, xbox 360’s gpu ran circles around the rsx in ps3.

The original design was to use a hyper evolved version of the kind of graphics processor ps2 used, by Toshiba. That console would have been incredibly powerful, but Sony’s developers complained of the difficulty and begged for a modern gpu.

Because they had to rush to find a gpu vendor after changing course, mistakes were made.

Had ps3 been equipped with a clone of 360’s gpu, it would have been great, and greater still if ps3 had 768mb of memory. That machine would make 360 look dated for sure.
 
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FingerBang

Member
Here’s the thing. The PS Now server hardware uses actual PS3 Cell hardware. IBM no longer produces those chips. Eventually that server hardware will fail and need to be replaced. Sony will have to figure out an emulator solution if they want to continue to charge people to play PS3 games.
This. So Sony has three options here:

1) Find a way to keep producing the CELL
2) Use servers made of PC components, and therefore develop a PC emulator
3) Use servers made of PS5 hardware, developing an emulator for PS5

I think option 1 is the least sustainable, but the choice between 2 and 3 might depend on whether it's actually possible to fully emulate the PS3 hardware using a PS5.

2 and 3 are probably both expensive, but 3 has the advantage of being able to run on home consoles and that means they could justify the cost of development by selling PS3 games since the store is still active.
That is, ignoring the licensing issue that might be a bigger problem than we think
 

DinoD

Member
PS2 is a crappy console too. The only good consoles Sony has put out is the original PSX and PS5.
I agree that they were/are the best. But for the others, I'm more of glass half full type of guy. Its bit like Beatles records (to me anyway). There's no crappy one, but some are better than others.

Regards
 

Shmunter

Member
It would be nice to have full legacy support going forward. But it would need to do more, improve iq and framerates as an option. That would be something of note.
 

adamsapple

Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
The reality is they are gonna spend a bunch of time R&D’ing this to death to find out no one cares about ps3

The thing is, once they do it, they don't exactly have to update the emulator all that frequently.

However, it will allow them to start putting more PS3 games on the marketplace with discounts and deals to essentially get more money from those legacy games.

A lot more people will buy the games digitally than those who might have discs in their closets.
 

CuriousNoah

Neo Member
The past has shown: if people use this feature and know that an OS upgrade would kill this feature, they just won't upgrade. That's how the world works and that's the reality Sony has to live with.


Yes, but one only very few people would use. As you wrote, most people will upgrade the OS to stay up2date.


Why would Sony not allow proper backwards compatibility?
They now do it for PS1/PS2/PS4/PSP with the new PS+, but I guess it will also play at least the games purchased digitally. I see no reason why Sony should not allow it once it is ready for PS3. If that day will ever come...

Well Sony should just charge an amount like MS does to enable the homebrew side. this will somewhat discourage people from jumping into pirating PS5 games as they have paid some amount to it. they could implement an go online once a month DRM check in the homebrew side and ensure people have not done anything shady or pirated PS4, PS5 apps.

Now there are good number of DRM solutions that can be implemented to the PS5 games and make it so that people have to go online once in two months or a month for license checks. when the console is at the end of its life cycle then release an update to disable the DRM so that people can play those games offline or just support those games with a backwards compat solution on the next console.

For dealing with patched or DRM removed PS5 pkg's, they can implement an hard locked software solution on the firmware to check the licenses and even the credit card or bank details for determining the purchase of the game on the account.

When I meant proper backwards compat, its targeted towards Sony's inhouse PS2 emulator on the PS4 which most probably is gonna be reused without updating it massively.
I have heard that it is not good enough to handle all of the PS2 games and felt that through homebrew better open source emulators can be used. My fault as I should have been specific about which console in my previous post.
 
Not happening it would make the highest tier of their PS Plus subscription redundant cause right now PS3 games are locked to that tier
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
PS2 emulation on PS4 was designed by a former PCSX2 Team member, Jake "Air" Stine, so I can see they hiring again Nekotekina or kd-11.

Saw https://www.neogaf.com/threads/ps2-...pcsx2-new-gui-incoming.1627284/post-265333592 thanks for the research.

The person(people) I am most
Interested in would be the ones that did emulation and upsampling of the GS, it was a a smart decision to apply minimal jitter and run the same GS pipeline multiple times and merge the results into a higher resolution image maintaining great compatibility. I wonder if on PS5 they could increase the amount of samples too.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Then why not just hold off on PS3 if they're really that serious about getting the emulation to work right? Maybe it's possible, but I just think Sony is waiting for people to get used to streaming it so they have to put in the money and work.
They are using their PSNow backend powered by actual PS3 HW based blades, at some point they have to have good enough PC HW based emulators else they need to keep manufacturing PS3’s which is a bit of a waste.

Having PS5 based HW server blades emulating PS3 too is in their best interests… and once they have those emulators well…
 

stranno

Member
Saw https://www.neogaf.com/threads/ps2-...pcsx2-new-gui-incoming.1627284/post-265333592 thanks for the research.

The person(people) I am most
Interested in would be the ones that did emulation and upsampling of the GS, it was a a smart decision to apply minimal jitter and run the same GS pipeline multiple times and merge the results into a higher resolution image maintaining great compatibility. I wonder if on PS5 they could increase the amount of samples too.
Yes, the PS2 upsampling on PS4 is pretty. Improvements like that is not something you usually see on official emulation (DS VC on Wii U had 2X upscaling option iirc).
 
The reality is they are gonna spend a bunch of time R&D’ing this to death to find out no one cares about ps3

Problem is you and I get that, but most dont. I believe last time I read, about 23-30% of Gamepass subscribers actually play BC games from the first xbox and xbox360. Even the games that are can we say stuck on PS3....its like you can count them on one hand. I loved my PS3 era but I couldnt give 2 shits to replay that stuff again. Sure for fun id try some but I can barely keep up with new titles. BC is a fad...if you care about it, in a month you will forget about it.
 

MaKTaiL

Member
Fake news, according to an Insomniac and Sony ICE PS3 engine programmer and a coder of the best PS3 emulator for PC it's impossible to properly emulate PS3 on PS5 at full speed, at least for some games that took full advantage of its hardware.

The remaining important games not playable locally on PS4 could get remasters, remakes or ported collections for PS4 & PS5 as many other ones did.
It's entirely possible if they had the proper source material. What they managed to accomplish on their own without any sort of documentation is already incredible. Imagine what Sony themselves could do.
 

Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
It's entirely possible if they had the proper source material. What they managed to accomplish on their own without any sort of documentation is already incredible. Imagine what Sony themselves could do.

Not necessarily. Emulation can be handled in a variety of ways. For example probably one of the most historically noteworthy emulators ever was UltraHLE, which using 1999 era PC hardware was able to pretty accurately run N64 titles. It accomplished this feat by, well, the secret is in its name! It does its heavy-lifting at a highly abstracted level. Pretty much the antithesis of what was considered correct practice at the time which was all about trying to replicate function down to cycle-exact detail.

The point being that using high-level techniques you can get results farm more efficiently than by low-level emulation, but there are trade-offs to be considered like accuracy, compatibility, and how feasible this approach is for a particular target piece of old hardware.

Where it gets more complicated still is when you factor in who's doing the emulation and what purpose ultimately is it trying to serve. If you are making emulation part of a commercial offering its very different than simply releasing it to the community. If your compatibility is limited, but the software is free, you're going to look like a hero. If however you have that same limited performance attached as part of a service or base functionality of another console, then its going to be thought of entirely differently.

Its not apples to oranges, but its not quite apples to apples either.
 

yurinka

Member
It's entirely possible if they had the proper source material. What they managed to accomplish on their own without any sort of documentation is already incredible. Imagine what Sony themselves could do.
PS3 SPUs have a sustained single core speed higher than the PS5 one. So can't emulate that, specially when some PS3 games had optimized code pumping all their SPUs at the same time and coordinated with each other. PS5 may have more speed, but not sustained.
 
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vkbest

Member
Not happening it would make the highest tier of their PS Plus subscription redundant cause right now PS3 games are locked to that tier

Sony PS3 emulator don’t means you play your PS3 games on your PS5, the emulator only would play PS+ downloaded games.

Their PS2 classics on PS4 was a PS2 emulator, the didnt release a system emulator to play your PS2 games, and they will not do for PS5, those emulators are tied to the service and maybe a probably digital release
 

Drew1440

Member
PS2 is a crappy console too. The only good consoles Sony has put out is the original PSX and PS5.
Have to agree, I prefer to play multiplatform PS2 games on either the Xbox or PC where available purely because the games look better and you don't have to fiddle with memory cards. I find a lot of PS2 games have poor quality textures.
Exclusives are fine, and I'd rather Sony focus on those titles first.
 
I see a lot of people choosing to believe this, but if this were true, why release without it, and why not mention it’s in devolpment in the original blogpost? They waited a long time to unveil spartucus?it seems weird if they had this in the back pocket they wouldn’t just wait until they figured out the ps3 emulator if they were “working on it” all ready. The major “bad press” the reveal got was because of the “streaming” aspect…why would they shoot themselves in the foot for no reason?
 
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Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
I see a lot of people choosing to believe this, but if this were true, why release without it, and why not mention it’s in devolpment in the original blogpost? They waited a long time to unveil spartucus?it seems weird if they had this in the back pocket they wouldn’t just wait until they figured out the ps3 emulator if they were “working on it” all ready. The major “bad press” the reveal got was because of the “streaming” aspect…why would they shoot themselves in the foot for no reason?
Because they are essentially taking the existing PSNow infrastructure and merging it with PS+ and taking advantage of their existing PS1 and PS2 emulators tech. The only new thing is PSP emulation (not sure when they started but it might be an offshoot of their PS2 emulator tech possibly).

At some point they will want to stop manufacturing PS3/CELL based blades and have a software only solution, it is the only thing that makes sense from a sustainable growth point of view. Ideally everything running on commodity X86 HW, maybe PS5 SoC’s on blades like MS is doing.
 
Sony PS3 emulator don’t means you play your PS3 games on your PS5, the emulator only would play PS+ downloaded games.

Their PS2 classics on PS4 was a PS2 emulator, the didnt release a system emulator to play your PS2 games, and they will not do for PS5, those emulators are tied to the service and maybe a probably digital release
I still don't see native PS3 emulation it not worth it for Sony to spend millions on it
 

SkylineRKR

Member
Ken was a genius, and Cell was brilliant. Ps3’s hardware fauts can be chalked up to bad business.

Such as Nvidia misleading Sony into thinking their design was superior… and as most of us enthusiasts know, xbox 360’s gpu ran circles around the rsx in ps3.

The original design was to use a hyper evolved version of the kind of graphics processor ps2 used, by Toshiba. That console would have been incredibly powerful, but Sony’s developers complained of the difficulty and begged for a modern gpu.

Because they had to rush to find a gpu vendor after changing course, mistakes were made.

Had ps3 been equipped with a clone of 360’s gpu, it would have been great, and greater still if ps3 had 768mb of memory. That machine would make 360 look dated for sure.

No, Ps3 was bad no matter how you put it. They alienated themselves by forcefeeding Blu Ray, jacking up the price with 200 bucks in 2006. They went for Rambus XDR, and partial conventional RAM. They went with Cell which was fine and all, but a lot of seasoned developers said its cores weren't great for game coding. The focus of the PS3 wasn't gaming in the first place. It was about movies and Cell being widely adopted. And they failed, because we were also on the brink of video on demand. Blu Ray 'winning' the format war was shallow. Nothing like how DVD captured the living rooms around the new millenium. Sony stopped giving a fuck too, with a PS5 SKU not even having a drive and the Pro had no UHD playback lol.

The things you want wouldn't help, even more RAM would likely jack up the price by another 100. An even more difficult hardware solution with a PS2 like GPU wouldn't help things either.

The reality is the PS3 was a shit show and bled money.
 

Kokoloko85

Member
Considering Sony have all the information on how to make a PS3, its source code and literally all the tech and software.

They made it on a console with 512MB ram, there’s much weaker PC’s that can run PS3 emulation.
I think it hard to believe they cant get it to run on PS5. Im not talking about playing your PS3 discs. Im talking about downloading PS3 games.

Yeah they have ported alot fo games, but alot hasnt. Killzone series, Infamous series, Motorcross series, MGS collection and MGS4, Folklore, Resistance Trilogy, Sly Racoon trilogy and loads of smaller games like Tokyo Jungle lol.


After the emulation is made, your telling me Sony can afford 2-5 people to support the emulator on PS5? Its not exactly something that requires MS money to run….

With the amount fo PS1/PS2 games that sold on PS3/Vita Im sure they can afford it. Both Virtual console and PS3’s classic store sold quite a bit of classics
 
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Whitecrow

Banned
Considering Sony have all the information on how to make a PS3, its source code and literally all the tech and software.

They made it on a console with 512MB ram, there’s much weaker PC’s that can run PS3 emulation.
I think it hard to believe they cant get it to run on PS5. Im not talking about playing your PS3 discs. Im talking about downloading PS3 games.

Yeah they have ported alot fo games, but alot hasnt. Killzone series, Infamous series, Motorcross series, MGS collection and MGS4, Folklore, Resistance Trilogy, Sly Racoon trilogy and loads of smaller games like Tokyo Jungle lol.


After the emulation is made, your telling me Sony can afford 2-5 people to support the emulator on PS5? Its not exactly something that requires MS money to run….

With the amount fo PS1/PS2 games that sold on PS3/Vita Im sure they can afford it. Both Virtual console and PS3’s classic store sold quite a bit of classics
Its not about running it. Is about running it at full speed, which given the PS3 architechture, is a bit of a challenge.
 

vkbest

Member
I still don't see native PS3 emulation it not worth it for Sony to spend millions on it

Its worth, they save money, people downloading games and playing locally than rendering on the cloud on the PS3 farm. Besides they are not producing PS3 hardware anymore, so reducing cloud rendering would be benefit in long term
 
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Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
After the emulation is made, your telling me Sony can afford 2-5 people to support the emulator on PS5? Its not exactly something that requires MS money to run….

Err, no. Just the legal team required to negotiate rights and clearances is a substantial outlay before anything gets done. Why do you think MS decided to stop expanding their line-up? You can't just emulate stuff if you're a real company without the consent of the original publisher/IP owner because you'd get sued into oblivion.
 

Kokoloko85

Member
Err, no. Just the legal team required to negotiate rights and clearances is a substantial outlay before anything gets done. Why do you think MS decided to stop expanding their line-up? You can't just emulate stuff if you're a real company without the consent of the original publisher/IP owner because you'd get sued into oblivion.

Obviously not without consent and permission. But your acting like they havent been dealing with publishers?

They have already dealt with plenty of publishers for PS3 games for the PSNOW streaming they have bene doing for years.
And they dealt with plenty of 3rd party licenses for bringing over PS1/PS2/PSP games to PS3 and Vita and now again supposedly with PS + Premium.

Plus no excuses for 1st party games like Killzone, Resistance, Sly, Motorstorm etc are all 1st party
 

TLZ

Banned
I see a lot of people choosing to believe this, but if this were true, why release without it, and why not mention it’s in devolpment in the original blogpost? They waited a long time to unveil spartucus?it seems weird if they had this in the back pocket they wouldn’t just wait until they figured out the ps3 emulator if they were “working on it” all ready. The major “bad press” the reveal got was because of the “streaming” aspect…why would they shoot themselves in the foot for no reason?
I'm guessing if it's truly in development, it'd still be unfinished and don't know the outcome yet. They don't want to create hype then disappointment if it doesn't work out. Then they'd really be shooting themselves in the foot. So it's always better to stay quiet.
 
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