Any news on PS2 backwards compatibilty

M

mjdted

There were some rumours on another forum that Sony's Liverpool studio is working on PS2 BC and are fairly close to completion. It would seem mad for Sony to not want to introduce some form of BC back into the PS3 at this point, but the longer they leave it the less the adavantage will be. I was amazed that MS were able to emulate the xbox entirely on the 360, so I'd be surprised if the technical hurdles for emulating the PS2 on the PS3 were insurmountable.

p.s. I hope I'll be forgiven for the missing "?" in the title.
 
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MS didn't emulate the XB entirely. They had to create custom profiles on a per-title bases. The reason to add PS2 emulation now I don't think has much to do with providing an upgrade path as much as reselling old content as downloads. I expect PS2 downloads of 'must play' titles that current PS3 owners have missed would generate a lot more money than PS1 titles.

As for technical hurdles, we've had big discussions on this but I've been unable to find them with a search. Bascially it has very little to do with power and everything to do with the ahrdware design you are emulating. If the PS2 doesn't map well to the PS3 (and it doesn't, because the GPU was really weird in PS2!) then it becomes incredibly hard to emulate. At the moment the half-hearted EU BC was CPU emulation on Cell, hardware GPU. We don't know yet if the emulation of GPU is possible on Cell, or maybe just not cost effective. But yes, it may be insurmountable.
 
There are 2 or 3 plugins that emulate GS fairly well (maybe not to the standards Sony would like) already for PCSX2. The EE is the problem for the PCSX2 team, not the GS.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
MS didn't emulate the XB entirely. They had to create custom profiles on a per-title bases. The reason to add PS2 emulation now I don't think has much to do with providing an upgrade path as much as reselling old content as downloads. I expect PS2 downloads of 'must play' titles that current PS3 owners have missed would generate a lot more money than PS1 titles.

As for technical hurdles, we've had big discussions on this but I've been unable to find them with a search. Bascially it has very little to do with power and everything to do with the ahrdware design you are emulating. If the PS2 doesn't map well to the PS3 (and it doesn't, because the GPU was really weird in PS2!) then it becomes incredibly hard to emulate. At the moment the half-hearted EU BC was CPU emulation on Cell, hardware GPU. We don't know yet if the emulation of GPU is possible on Cell, or maybe just not cost effective. But yes, it may be insurmountable.
Click to expand...

"If the PS2 doesn't map well to the PS3 (and it doesn't, because the GPU was really weird in PS2!) then it becomes incredibly hard to emulate."

Yeah problem is everthing that does not map out easily has to be done in software. Trying to emulate the GS using a low level using software only approach would require an insane amount of single threaded performance. There is not a cpu that has the amount of performance necessary for that task. So your left hacking each game to run, and even then there are bugs galore. That's why Microsoft has given up most of their effort. The best Sony could hope for is the hackwork game specific approach with low compatability(a la microsoft). I would bet the bank that MS & Sony will opt for strict 100% binary compatibility like Nintendo did with gamecube->wii next gen.
 
DJ12 said:
(maybe not to the standards Sony would like)
Click to expand...
Put it like this - the best PS1 emulator had around a decade of development on it by now, and it's still full of compatibility issues that require game-specific hacks to work-around.
But hey, it's got customizable shader filters to make up for it :oops:

The EE is the problem for the PCSX2 team, not the GS.
Click to expand...
Sony has pretty much perfect EE emulation - albeit that doesn't mean it can run perfect accuracy at full speed (but you only need full accuracy for certain games, and during certain parts of them - which is where stuff like game profiles come in).
Anyway PCSX2 currently doesn't get past intro in some games that would make an interesting test for how accurate their GS emulation is.
 
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I am curious as to what caused the BC for Tekken Tag Tournament not to work well. What were the bottlenecks, or technical differences that made that one hard to emulate on a PAL BC PS3?

I expected that ZOE2 wouldnt work either but it worked flawlessly. So did Silent Hill 3. Both some of the latest best looking PS2 games.

Tekken Tag though also looks astonishingly good, and I dont think there is a fighting game on the PS2 that has as much detail as that one. They must have used some very specific techniques to achieve these visuals which I think might be hard to emulate
 
DJ12 said:
There are 2 or 3 plugins that emulate GS fairly well (maybe not to the standards Sony would like) already for PCSX2. The EE is the problem for the PCSX2 team, not the GS.
Click to expand...

PCSX2 on the PC requires CPU power which, even though theoretically within the reach of Cell, is far from trivial to achieve.
 
Since they already got the EE down, it only comes down to the GS...

Problem is, besides the quirky GS itself, the very fast eDram. It would be easier to emulate that on the 360, this is for sure.

I am sure, Sony is developing a software solution, so they can sell PS2 games on PSN. I guess, they will go the same route as MS does with their emulation, to at least get some games out for profit.
 
I think I remember reading that the Cell Processor was designed in such a way as to facilitate emulation of the Emotion Engine. Something about having both Big Endian and Little Endian operational modes. Did I totally hallucinate that? In any case, the GS is indeed the real question mark now.
 
TheWretched said:
Problem is, besides the quirky GS itself, the very fast eDram. It would be easier to emulate that on the 360, this is for sure.
Click to expand...
No it wouldn't. The way 360 works, it would most likely be harder (or impossible).

Brad Grenz said:
Something about having both Big Endian and Little Endian operational modes.
Click to expand...
Marketing speak. Cell has instructions to rotate orientation of register content, which helps, but it's not exactly being two-way compatible.
It's actually funny, because IIRC modern PPC designs have support for both endian types, as did some console designs in the past, like SH4 or R5900 for instance (though they usually disable the feature in shipping products).
 
Fafalada said:
Anyway PCSX2 currently doesn't get past intro in some games that would make an interesting test for how accurate their GS emulation is.
Click to expand...

I'm kind of curious about these. Could you share a few games that, from your position as a developer, use the GS (or PS2 in general) in high-performance/exotic/strange/stupid ways?
 
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Nesh said:
I am curious as to what caused the BC for Tekken Tag Tournament not to work well. What were the bottlenecks, or technical differences that made that one hard to emulate on a PAL BC PS3?

I expected that ZOE2 wouldnt work either but it worked flawlessly. So did Silent Hill 3. Both some of the latest best looking PS2 games.

Tekken Tag though also looks astonishingly good, and I dont think there is a fighting game on the PS2 that has as much detail as that one. They must have used some very specific techniques to achieve these visuals which I think might be hard to emulate
Click to expand...


Tekken Tag was coded before much of the development hardware was finalized and without final documentation, so it probably is coded in some interesting ways. :D
 
Nesh said:
I expected that ZOE2 wouldnt work either but it worked flawlessly. So did Silent Hill 3. Both some of the latest best looking PS2 games.
Click to expand...

Wow, i dint expect ZOE2 to be emulated that good! But the most power hungry game on PS2 is most definitely God of War 2. I recall that devs mentioned in one interview that they are efficiently using 97% of all PS2 resources.
 
There seems to be some net nerd rising about some patent Sony filed last december about Emotion Engine emulation and how this means full backwards compatability is on it's way "in the next few weeks"

Don't see how this changes anything though as the EE has been emulated for quite some time now maybe not exactly which is what the patent implies but good enough to play most games. Still no word on GS emulation though so I doubt it will make any difference to those without the GS in their PS3s.
 
Well I imagine any official BC from Sony would need extensive testing to make sure as many games as possible work whilst retaining the ability to detect the game in play and adjust itself accordingly as well as add game specific fixes to make the emulation proper. The PCSX2 emulator for PCs had alot of different options for specific games. While many of the game can be made to run properly, there are still runtime issues and of course the biggest problem of emulating the PS2 is the absurdity of complication the PS2 really was in design. At least I got Odin Sphere to run perfectly on PCSX2! Now I just need a controller!

It still kinda dumbfounds me to realize how weird the PS2's architecture (especially that for rendering) really was, and how held back it really was as well. No dedicated vertex/geometry hardware, no multi-texturing capability, only 32 MB of system RAM....ulgh my commendations to all the devs that had to work on it, and further commendations who made higher level effects like shadows (especially self shadowing), shaders, and reflections even workable on that mess. Considering true dedicated 3D geometry acceleration had been around for a couple years on the PC, it's weird that the PS2 didn't get it, instead opting for using the Vector units on the EE. And while the Dreamcast had a similar issue, the hardware did get to see geometry T n L later on in the form of the Naomi 2 arcade board with these specs gotten from http://system16.com/hardware.php?id=725:

The NAOMI (New Arcade Operation Machine Idea) is also Japanese for beauty above all else.
CPU : 2 x Hitachi SH-4 32-bit RISC CPU (200 MHz 360 MIPS / 1.4 GFLOPS)
Graphic Engine : 2 x PowerVR 2 (PVR2DC-CLX2) GPU's - (under the fans)
Geometry Processor : Custom Videologic T+L chip "Elan" (100mhz) - (Under Heatsink)
Sound Engine : ARM7 Yamaha AICA 45 MHZ (with internal 32-bit RISC CPU, 64 channel ADPCM)
Main Memory : 32 MByte 100Mhz SDRAM
Graphic Memory : 32 MByte
Model Data Memory : 32MByte
Sound Memory : 8 MByte
Media : ROM Board / GD-Rom
Simultaneous Number of Colors : Approx. 16,770,000 (24bits)
Polygons : 10 Million polys/sec with 6 light sources
Rendering Speed : 2000 Mpixels/sec (unrealistic max, assumes overdraw of 10x which nothing uses)

Interesting, being basically a doubled up DC with T n L and alot more RAM.
 
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Mobius1aic said:
It still kinda dumbfounds me to realize how weird the PS2's architecture (especially that for rendering) really was, and how held back it really was as well. No dedicated vertex/geometry hardware, no multi-texturing capability...
Click to expand...
It did have multitexturing capability, just not in a single pass. It as built around a different principle. If you have a GPU that can draw 300,000 pixels a frame with 4 textures per pixel, and one that can draw 1,200,000 pixels per frame with 1 texture per pixel, it amounts to the same thing, as the latter console has enough capacity to render the same pixel 4 times with four textures and combine them all (which I'm sure you know, but I'm just spelling it out!).

Again, no hardware vertex processors isn't inherently a bad thing. Larrabee hasn't got them either. As long as you've got enough vector processing power spare, whether that's in a CPU or GPU, you can process vertices. Now of course, specialist hardware will tend to be faster per clock than general purpose hardware, but the VU's in EE were hardly general purpose by most developers' definition ;). The main issue I have with PS3 was, due to the design decisions, no convenient AA option, and primitive texture support if the developers were taking it easy. Still a funky designed system though. It's jsut that in taking an alternative strategy to solving the issues of graphics rendering, they designed something very incompatible with general hardware that we're now trying to emulate PS2 on.
 
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