When I got the XSX recently, it was so I can play Starfield when it comes out. That was basically the only reason. I did not realize the extensive backwards compatibility that this thing has. But since getting it, I’ve been playing FF13 trilogy, Fable games, Dragon Age series, Lost Odyssey, etc. Basically all games of note going all the way back to the OG Xbox will play on the latest console. Either with the original disc, or you can even purchase them online.
The point of my post is I think it’s a real travesty that PlayStation doesn’t do this. I don’t understand it. First of all, you cannot buy most PS1-PS3 games on the digital store. You can’t use the discs. The main way to get access to these games is through the top tier of PS+. But the selection is quite limited, and PS3 games in particular are streaming only.
With the selection, I want to point out that you can’t even play most of the Killzone series on PS+. This is a first party title. There is absolutely no reason that Killzone shouldn’t be available. Killzone 1 isn’t even on there. A PS2 title that is not graphically demanding.
As for the streaming of PS3 games, maybe this was justifiable back on the PS4 because the PS3 has a unique architecture that can be difficult to emulate without performance drops. But with the capabilities of the PS5, it’s not credible to claim that it can’t emulate a PS3. It certainly could, if Sony wanted to assign resources to make an emulator.
I am not a fanboy of one or the other, and I probably still play more on the PS5 than my Xbox, but I think Microsoft should market their backwards compatibility superiority a lot more than they currently do.
Software emulation is very much possible. There is software for x86 and even ARM processors that emulate PS1, PS2(doesn’t work great on ARM I many cases) and PS3 (x86 only currently)which work well enough. If Sony cared to they could develop their own software emulation layer to run on PS5 to run just about everything from the previous generation.
Also Microsoft had similar issues in hardware emulation because, while the original Xbox and the Xbox one were on x86, the 360 was a Power PC architecture similar in some ways to the PS3 which ran Power PC with other proprietary coprocessors. They had to develop a Power PC emulator in software to run 360 games on the Xbox one.
A first party solution can’t work “well enough”, it just has to work.
PS1 emulation at this point should be trivial, 2 and 3 is not. The first time someone puts a disc in and it doesn’t work would be worse for them than not having it at all.
I think the thing holding back PS1 emulation is that once they open that door, everyone will go “What about 2 and 3?”
Only if you dramatically lower your standards for what backwards compatibility means. PS3 emulators might be progressing, but they’re far from the native hardware in actual functionality, especially with games that actually used the features of the hardware that made the PS3 a powerhouse.
Emulators can wave that away as “it is what it is”. Sony advertising backwards compatibility couldn’t.