Gradthrawn
Veteran
Which has me thinking, why even bother with a decoder if this is for the PS3? That seems beyond redundant.
Rumour: Sony considering Backwards Compatibility peripheral
- Thread starter patsu
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Which has me thinking, why even bother with a decoder if this is for the PS3? That seems beyond redundant.
upnorthsox
Veteran
My guess would be that they are reading the disc off ps3 drive and streaming that raw over the ethernet port to the DVD emulator which is then sending it to the EE/GS. That in turn processes it and streams it back to an emulation window which sends it out to the HDMI port for display. The only hangup I see is that the device would need its own power source.
Gradthrawn
Veteran
At the moment, I just can't wrap my head around that data path and what actually needs to be decoded. We're not talking about an encoded video stream or encrypted data, are we? Unless, to save bandwidth between the host device and this emulation device, they're compressing it on the host, sending it to the adapter, decompressing it using the DVD "decoder", and then processing it.
Digital Foundry article on it. Haven't read it yet, maybe it explains what the data flow would look like.
upnorthsox
Veteran
The issue is that if you touch it, you have to maintain it. You may also open up an unintended exploit which now compromises the host. If you just stream it raw then you're just a passthru. There's also the possible benefit of being able to copy discs to HDD and streaming from there.
Gradthrawn
Veteran
Read the DF article and it still didn't really clarify much for me.
Understandable. What I don't get is what data needs to be decoded instead of just processed. So far as I'm aware, the data coming from the game disc is not encrypted/encoded (outside of audio/video data that's encoded in a particular format). And that the copyright protection systems take place at the initial loading of the game (or reading of the disc). Why would a DVD decoder be needed to to read raw data (that's not encoded)? Any data captured by a sniffer of the stream could just as easily be captured by reading it directly from the disc in a standard drive, right? I would assume that the initial disc authenticity verification process would take place entirely on the PS3 (or host).
Understandable. What I don't get is what data needs to be decoded instead of just processed. So far as I'm aware, the data coming from the game disc is not encrypted/encoded (outside of audio/video data that's encoded in a particular format). And that the copyright protection systems take place at the initial loading of the game (or reading of the disc). Why would a DVD decoder be needed to to read raw data (that's not encoded)? Any data captured by a sniffer of the stream could just as easily be captured by reading it directly from the disc in a standard drive, right? I would assume that the initial disc authenticity verification process would take place entirely on the PS3 (or host).
Gradthrawn
Veteran
Does the PS3 currently recognize any and all PS2 discs
Mine does.
More importantly, it can, and has in the past. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only components used in the BC PS3s were the EE/GS combo and standalone GS chips, correct? From that, can we assume that recognizing PS2 discs is simply a matter of firmware/software?The DVD decoder is probably included just for completeness. Said old gen console needs to read games off a storage medium.
AlStrong, is there anything special with PS2 DVD disc ? (I have no idea).
PS3 Fat can obviously read PS2 discs, but other PS3s can read PS2 SingStar discs to grab the song library.
EDIT: For Blu-ray, early PS3 can read AVCHD directory structure off a USB thumbdrive too (e.g., to launch a BD-Live app). So I don't really see a strategic difference between DVD, Blu-ray or other storage decoder at this level.
AlStrong, is there anything special with PS2 DVD disc ? (I have no idea).
PS3 Fat can obviously read PS2 discs, but other PS3s can read PS2 SingStar discs to grab the song library.
EDIT: For Blu-ray, early PS3 can read AVCHD directory structure off a USB thumbdrive too (e.g., to launch a BD-Live app). So I don't really see a strategic difference between DVD, Blu-ray or other storage decoder at this level.
I just did some Googling. AFAICS the disc format is fairly standard, and there are software apps for ripping PS2 DVDs, but authoring of PS2 DVDs deliverate places in bad blacks which consumer level DVD writers fix, and the absence of blocks means the disc is rejected by an unchipped PS2. So any old DVD drive should be enough to supply data into the PS2 emulator.
The whole connection between PS2Box/PS3 will need to be secured somewhat, if you just verify the game on the PS3 you could figure out the protocol and eg. attach the PS2Box to a PC. I suppose that having an own component doing the en-/decoding (probably badly translated from Japanese en-/decryption?) is a security measure to make reversing harder - similarly to the isolated SPU but fixed-function.
And AFAIK some PS2 games did some additional authentication sweeps while running.
Unless you patch the PS2 games you need to make the processor think its talking to the original dvdcontroller, and that probably means you need to pack the information that normal drives read and those additional "things" used in copyprotection and transport them over ethernet, and then emulate the PS2`s dvdcontroller behaviour. Some protections for example measure how long it took to read a sector (which might be dependent on where the drive was reading just before that so its not something thats constant), information thats lacking if you transmit just RAW data.
The DVD decoder/emulator is probably peeling the raw data and additional information from a stream (decoding) and then emulating the PS2`s dvdcontroller at a very low level.
To me it seems the PS2Box consists of a whole unmodified PS2 on the left side (same chip(s) that are used in the PSTwo) and connected to a lowlevel IO Emulator (seems to be a full computer) on the right side.
