Which is easier? 360 software BC of XBox or PS3 software BC of PS2?

[Fox5]

Two completely different approaches.

Of the two the PS3s solution is far harder as they are attempting to emulate in full the entire PS2 in software, whereas MS release a "fix" for a top title so the new hardware can interpret the old software.

When Sony get the emulator up to speed, just about everything will work without further input from Sony, but MS will have to continue releasing "fixes" every time they want to add another game to the BC list.

In the long run it would probably be easier to have gone down the full emulation route, but in the short term the "fixes" MS release are easier, but as I said, they will have to keep doing it on a game by game basis until they cannot be bothered with BC anymore.

MS's approach likely wouldn't have worked for Sony. MS had a full OS and kept nearly all coding at high level APIs, so it should be much easier for them to interpret the calls.

That aside, I don't see any real advantage to switching to software emulation on the current PS3, unless they were to gain the ability to do 3d rendering at higher resolutions in software, but that seems unlikely without the use of a high-level API like DirectX/OpenGL that could abstract away the scaling.

PC emulators have no problem making PSX (or ps2, or even gamecube) games run at a higher resolution.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

That aside, I don't see any real advantage to switching to software emulation on the current PS3.

Sony save $30 per console!

 

[DieH@rd]

Yeah, how big is it PS3 flash memory [for OS]?

 

[archie4oz]

Do we know that the current revision of the PS3 has enough flash ram to contain the full PS2 emulator?

What makes you think it's not already there?

Yeah, how big is it PS3 flash memory [for OS]?

128MB. The current 1.51 firmware is 99MB..

 

[Thowllly]

128MB. The current 1.51 firmware is 99MB..

Maybe I just dreamt it, but when I looked at somepictures of the PS3 innards, there were 2 128MB flash chips in there, one on each side of the MB. Maybe they're only 64MB each? Or one is a backup in case of an ugrade goes wrong? Or maybe there really was just one flash chip, my memory is a bit fuzzy....

 

[Mmmkay]

Maybe I just dreamt it, but when I looked at somepictures of the PS3 innards, there were 2 128MB flash chips in there, one on each side of the MB. Maybe they're only 64MB each? Or one is a backup in case of an ugrade goes wrong? Or maybe there really was just one flash chip, my memory is a bit fuzzy....

There are indeed 2 chips and they are both 128MB. One may be a backup or intermediate storage location, or it may be used for something else entirely. But I don't think that the firmware size will exceed 128MB.

 

[Panajev2001a]

What makes you think it's not already there?

It could be a possibility that a software PSTwo emulator could already be in the firmware, just how big do you think PSOne and PSTwo emulators could get (or how small) ?

I wonder how much stuff will be added to the FLASH memory and how much will be installed on the HDD: it makes little sense to me to not to take advantage of the fact that every console is supposed to have an HDD (I wonder though, what happens if you take out the HDD and power-on the console without the HDD installed...) inside. What you might want to load in the Firmware could be necessary hooks to load HDD content at start-up or on-demand and get them up and running.