r/hardware • u/dirtyhairry • 2d ago
News PS5 hack delivers native PS2 disc support and 4K upscaling where Sony refused to — after PS2 breakthrough, homebrew dev confirms PS3 disc support is next for PS5
https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/playstation/ps5-hack-delivers-native-ps2-disc-support-and-4k-upscaling-where-sony-refused-to-after-ps2-breakthrough-homebrew-dev-confirms-ps3-disc-support-is-next-for-ps561
u/callmedaddyshark 2d ago
I thought ps3 had a really weird architecture that was hard to emulate
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u/Islu64 2d ago
In a sense, yes, it is "hard" to emulate (as in, it's "hard" to make a ps3 emulator that is "optimized"), but hardware is so powerful now compared to hardware from the ps3 era that we can essentially brute force our way into getting good performance while emulating PS3 even if it isn't "optimized"
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u/Falkenmond79 1d ago
This. I managed to emulate PS3 no problems on a ryzen 2600x and an AMD rx5700xt with 32 gb of ram. The emulation was a bit janky but when it ran, it ran fine.
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u/Durendal_1707 2d ago
it is resource heavy to emulate not necessarily hard, hardware just caught up
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u/JKTwice 2d ago
PS2 ALSO had a weird architecture (custom MIPS processor and memory layout) but people still got it done. PS3 took awhile to become really performant though.
That’s not to say PS3 isn’t weird though. It’s PowerPC except you have one hyperthreaded core surrounded by a bunch of baby PowerPC cores with no L2 cache and floating point units.
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u/WingedGundark 2d ago
Cell SPEs aren't PowerISA units, they use SPU ISA developed specifically for Cell and for these units. They aren't also general purpose cores, but SIMD units specialized for vector processing.
SPEs also don't need their own FP unit, because the SPE is practically a FP unit itself. Only caveat is that it is fast only with single precision, performance drops from the cliff with DP.
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u/JKTwice 1d ago
Ah you’re right they are their own ISA my bad. They’re really good at some kinds of math but the real killer is that they don’t support out of order instruction, so keeping the cores fed and happy is super tough in most instances. I remember kinda reading them as hardware AltiVec, where you can send big chunks of data and they are really good at breaking them into 32-bit chunks. They can do DP FP but you’re right it is pretty bad.
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u/WingedGundark 1d ago
Those SPEs also don't have cache, because it wouldn't increase performance. Each SPE has 256kB Local Store (LS) SRAM. It runs at full SPE speed (in case of PS3 Cell 3.2GHz) and if I remember correctly, with 8ns latency. This is actually running in a similar performance compared to what wpuld be cache, it is just not transparent to programs like cache and works like your normal RAM. Cache would ran at same speed, thus it wouldn't improve performance over using the on-die LS. From the system perspective LS behaves in a similar fashion to a cache and is naturally much faster than fetching data from system RAM, but is also more flexible than traditional cache and can be programmed. Downside is that it again introduces more complexity.
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u/JKTwice 1d ago
Did you work with any CELL products, like make software for them?
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u/WingedGundark 1d ago
No, certainly not. I wrote one assignment about the architecture roughly 20 years ago when I was studying engineering as my second degree. It is also still an interesting architecture, albeit not really that good except for very niche cases. And gaming consoles is not one of them. I've read about it few times since too, both Cell and Xenon used in X360 are intetrsting developments from early 2000s when PowerPC looked like a viable ISA and something like Cell architecture looked like a reasonable solution. Cell architecture and ISA is really well documented, you can easily find IBM papers about the SPU ISA etc. online.
At that time IBM, Toshiba and Sony were willing to do something bold, something I think no manufacturer wouldn't dare to try just few years later. It was sort of the last gasp of the 80s and 90s ISA wars.
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u/JKTwice 1d ago
The main thing PowerISA has these days is that it can handle way more raw data than x86. AFAIK it is still a much more modular and expandable architecture. It simply got too power hungry though for consumer use once Motorola backed out (I think they still use the core for embedded applications though).
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u/WingedGundark 22h ago
Big hit for Power was Apple dumping it for Intel x86. Some people also suspect that both Sony and Toshiba saw IBM backstabbing them when they developed Xenon for Microsoft using partly the same technology as Cell and both using Power PC ISA. And MS being of course direct competitor for Sony, which Sony was understandably pissed about.
This was possibly a big hit for IBM reputation as a partner, at least within a certain part of the industry, which again afdected negatively to future development and demand of PPC based cpus.
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u/grizzlor_ 12h ago
I mean Apple dumped PowerPC because IBM took it in a direction that was bad for Apple — the G5 was too power hungry to ever put in a laptop.
IBM seemed to care more about the future of their POWER servers than Apple’s desktop CPU business. But you’re right that it hurt the general public perception of the Power ISA.
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u/System0verlord 1d ago
Shout out to the US military for buying a bunch of PS3s to run Linux on as a supercomputer back in the day.
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u/ash_ninetyone 1d ago
To point out, the PS3 needed a baby PS2 inside it to emulate PS2 games very early on, which they later removed for costs
Processing power these days helps, given you can now at least brute force your way through these issues, if you can not find any instruction set or way of programming a more optimised way
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u/DigitaIBlack 2d ago
It is but there's been massive progress in the last 2 years.
And because the PS5 is fundamentally x86 with some quirks, it's not that hard for them to take the progress done on Windows and transplant it to the PS5. Especially because AI can do a lot of the tedious work.
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u/Nice-Information-335 2d ago
also the fact that it is PowerPC for the CPU arch, completely different architecture
For the PS4 and PS5, you can "emulate" the CPU very easily as its the same instructions, but you still need to re-implement all the syscalls and such
For the PS3 you need to that and emulate the PPC architecture while you are at it, which is more intensive
This did mean for a while it was quite hard to emulate (still is, tbf) in terms of the processing power you need, but modern hardware is good enough to where that isn't as big of an issue as it used to be
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u/randomkidlol 2d ago
powerpc isnt hard to emulate in x86. gamecube, wii, and wiiu emulation is very quick. the ps3's CPU had many technologies that were only made common in CPUs made recently such as AVX512 like instructions.
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u/Ok_Simple_459 15h ago
It was. But even the emulator is mode than a decade old now. There's a android port of RPCS3 now as well.
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u/agowa338 1d ago
From what I understand people stopped trying to emulate the architecture and are now going for translation layers reimplementing the APIs.
Also the most weird thing was the unified memory layout. Where GPU and CPU can equally fast access the same memory. You've the same on e.g. MacBooks nowerdays. And the PS5 has the same, so...
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u/TRKlausss 2d ago
If buying is not owning, piracy is not theft.
This is a huge middle finger to their latest shenanigans. Keep it coming.
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u/Conjo_ 2d ago
piracy is not theft.
never has been
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u/Durendal_1707 2d ago
i’m actually downloading a car right now
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u/cdthrowmyselfaway 1d ago
You almost had me? heh, you never had me.. you never even had your car...
https://media1.tenor.com/m/P2fj6Mt9-dsAAAAd/fast-and-furious-vin-diesel.gif
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u/No-Channel3917 2d ago
Do y'all have anything like interesting to add when these posts come up or just parroting the same thing for like 2 months now
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u/AndrewM96 1d ago
Good, hopefully it becomes as annoying as the fact they're trynna make gaming cloud-based. Then maybe something will change.
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u/jonydevidson 2d ago
Piracy is not in fact theft, but it is copyright infringement, proven in court many times.
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u/Yes-Reddit-is-racist 2d ago
If buying is not owning, piracy is not theft.
Why this childish nonsense lives on I'll never understand. You buy a license you've always bought a license even a disc is a physical licence. Its the same for music and film even books.
You're also correct the piracy is not theft, it is however piracy and is still a crime.
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u/Islu64 2d ago
There is no such thing as a "physical license" in games, music, films or any other form of media. You own the copies of a piece of software or media you've bought and you can do countless things a digital license doesn't allow you to, like creating backups.
Everyone knows piracy is a crime, and nobody cares about it being a crime, because it's not morally wrong.
The only nonsense here is your comment.
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u/Yes-Reddit-is-racist 2d ago
There is no such thing as a "physical license" in games, music, films or any other form of media. You own the copies of a piece of software or media you've bought and you can do countless things a digital license doesn't allow you to, like creating backups.
None of this is correct.
You own the copies of a piece of software or media you've bought
You own a license, that may be tied to an account or a physical object but that is all you have ever owned.
you can do countless things a digital license doesn't allow you to, like creating backups.
You can create backups of digital it's usually easier than physical.
The only nonsense here is your comment.
Like it or not, I quite frankly dont care about your opinion, but you are factually incorrect about how copywrite and ownership of media works.
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u/Islu64 2d ago
When you buy a physical copy of a game, movie, music album, etc, you own a copy, not a license. If you truly believe what i just said is incorrect, there is no point in continuing this conversation.
As i said, complete nonsense on your part.
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u/UMACTUALLYITS23 2d ago
If this were true why can a company decide I can no longer play a disc game I have because they don't want to support it anymore?
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u/Islu64 1d ago
You own the physical disc and the copy of the software stored on it , which lets you resell, lend, or play the game offline on compatible hardware.
What companies can actually shut down are the authentication servers, online services, or servers that host mandatory day one downloads. If a disc requires an active server connection just to boot or install, the issue isn't that they legally "revoked" your disc or "shut down your copy", the issue is that they designed the product with an external dependency that eventually dies. That doesn't mean you don't own a copy of the software, it just means that the game requires an external service to run, and that service is the thing they shut down.
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u/UMACTUALLYITS23 1d ago
If they can prevent me from playing the single player portion of my physical disc then functionally there is no difference.
If all they have to do is tie everything on the disc to requiring you to get their permission to use it then you don't really own it, at least until laws nut up and require them to allow you to play games offline.
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u/Islu64 1d ago
Very fair point, I agree with what you said for the most part and I think the main issue is that the law isn't catching up to the way modern games work. But the heart of the matter is that we do own the copy of the software we've bought, but we don't own the services provided to make it run. The issue you pointed out is a big problem and it's precisely why the Stop Killing Games movement was born.
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u/Strazdas1 19h ago
They cannot. It would be illegal for them to decide that. This is why even when games are recalled, those who kept their copies can continue playing them.
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u/UMACTUALLYITS23 16h ago
Uh that's not true, they can absolutley decide that everything on your disc is tied to their online services that they can shut down at any moment, rendering everything on your disc unusable.
For example, even though I own the disc I can no longer play the single player of Battleborn because they decided it was tied to their online servers.
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u/Strazdas1 15h ago
They can shut down the online service, they cannot deny you running the software.
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u/UMACTUALLYITS23 15h ago
Which is impossible to use without the online service.
If I can't do a single thing with the software, how have they not denyed my use of it?
If it was a purely multiplayer game it would be undrrstandable at least, but it's not, and thus we're back to my point, if a company can simply require all content on a disc to require their authorisation to use through online checks, whether or not it makes sense for the content, how exaclty can anyone claim we own the content on the discs?
Until the laws catch up with this, you really don't, as any company can decide their game requires their permission to use, disc or not when they design it.
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u/BioshockEnthusiast 2d ago
You are factually incorrect about how the word copyright is even spelled so forgive me if I don't take your not a lawyer lookin ass word for granted champ
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u/HonourableYodaPuppet 1d ago
copywrite, lmao. dude writes words how they sound spoken and even the spellcheck cant catch it all
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2d ago edited 2d ago
[deleted]
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u/Islu64 2d ago
That is still a physical copy, not a license.
You own that copy. The restrictions on, for example, public performance, exist because public broadcasting constitutes either commercial exploitation or unauthorized distribution of the copyrighted work.
Paying fees for playing that piece of media in public or commercial use doesn't mean that your physical copy is actually a digital license, it simply means copyright law limits how you can exploit that piece of media, which is someone else's intellectual property, even if you legally own the physical media. You still own a copy.
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u/YumiYumiYumi 2d ago
Why this childish nonsense lives on I'll never understand
It's pushback against an industry message, heavily promoting the idea that piracy is theft. The classic "You wouldn't steal a car" ad is an example of the narrative being pushed.
You buy a license you've always bought a license even a disc is a physical licence. Its the same for music and film even books.
I'm not even sure 'buy' is the appropriate term, given that it can be revoked at any time, especially for digital-only media.
Physical media often implies a perpetual license at least, though with some DRM schemes, that isn't necessarily the case.it is however piracy and is still a crime
Whether piracy, or copyright infringement, is a crime, is region specific. In many jurisdictions, copyright infringement is considered a civil issue, not criminal.
Of course, rights holders can still come after you if you infringe their rights and seek civil remedies, but it may not be considered a 'crime', depending on where you live (and thus not something which can attract criminal penalties).1
u/Strazdas1 19h ago
Civil issues are crimes too. It does not have to be a felony to be a crime. Illegal parking is crime.
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u/Strazdas1 19h ago
If you purchase a software you own that copy of the software. No, the license excuse does not and should not bear any legality.
Piracy is a crime of copyright infringement, which is very different than theft.
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u/sharkeymcsharkface 2d ago
Today I learned the PS5 can’t read CDs!
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u/Ophioneus 2d ago
Learnt that some time ago while trying to play music from one and was quite confused until I googled it.
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u/brokenfix 2d ago
Ever since PS4. Back then I wanted to listen to some CDs and was confused why my PS4 wasn't reading them when the PS3 could
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u/idothinksotim 1d ago
The PS4 is an even worse situation because it actually has the cd laser hardware inside it, it's just that Sony disabled in it software for.... No real reason other than that they're dicks
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u/AndrewM96 1d ago
Wait fr? Or you're just messing?
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u/idothinksotim 1d ago
Nope. For real.
Sony have never addressed it.
If you read the FCC safety information it explicitly lists the cd laser and wavelength for the PS4, and if you look up the part number for the optical drive on PS4 it has a cd laser.
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u/glytxh 2d ago
That feels kind of absurd, I can’t lie, but I’m sure there are like 12 people who’ve probably ever even tried it.
I can’t even remember the last time I played a CD.
The only disc drive on my house is my PS2, and that’s basically just a fancy DVD player for me these days.
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u/doscomputer 2d ago
but I’m sure there are like 12 people who’ve probably ever even tried it.
thats a sony marketing assumption if I've ever heard one, you know all those discs that still get pressed and sold every year? 0% chance there aren't hundreds if not thousands of people who tried to use their ps5 to play a new album like they could have on literally every console before it
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u/GenZia 2d ago
And that's one of the many reasons I resent consoles.
My PC doesn't throw a hissy fit when I try to run a PS2 era game.
As a matter of fact, I'm currently replaying Splinter Cell - Chaos Theory after years and it's been a blast with smooth 120FPS frame rate, proper wide-screen support at 1440p, FoV fix, no mouse acceleration, etc. Everything you'd expect from a modern game, basically.
Sure, I'd to jump a few hoops to get it working smoothly, but 'PC Gaming Wiki' has rendered it a non-issue.
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u/Available-Call7127 1d ago
Brother I love PC gaming but that’s a damn lie and you know it. PLENTY of mid 2000s and earlier titles are a pain in the absolute balls to get to run on PC. Across 3 different ship of theseus’d PC’s I don’t think I’ve ever gotten Fallout 3 to run past the launcher despite hours of tinkering.
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u/Strazdas1 19h ago
Depends on the games really. I ran into some old games that used bugs in DirectX to render graphics faster. Bugs that are fixed in 9.0C and results in bugged out render. Luckily theres usually a community mod that fixes it.
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u/i7-4790Que 1d ago edited 1d ago
Lots of old 00s games are a complete headache to get running properly, or just acceptably. Many of them need various unofficial fixes/patchworks you need to stumble into while you troubleshoot, hoping someone else on Google search ran into the same issues.
And you'll still run into weird issues as you play. I've had games that absolutely hate being tabbed out of. So get used to just restarting things constantly and saving often in case you have one that likes to freeze/crash/black screen on occasion no matter what voodoo ritual you did downloading patches, running compatibility modes.
I wish it was all sunshine and rainbows, but it's not.
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u/GenZia 1d ago edited 1d ago
It is all sunshines and rainbows... with a few asterisks.
If you try to run a vintage game by clicking on the exe, it likely won't work.
But there are workaround. API wrappers like DGVoodoo 2 and D3D8to9 exist for this very reason.
Look them up.
If you want to go back even further, there's always DOS Box.
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u/ash_ninetyone 1d ago
I needed to at the time, because I needed the money, but I now regret selling my PS2 and Xbox games.
Thing is, I sold them to family friends, and I don't know what they did with them.
I'm gonna have to rip the games I've left since I have Dark Cloud still somewhere. Or at least I should have it still somewhere in storage.
I'd prefer native remasters ofc, but needs must when there's no one to do it
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u/Mlabonte21 2d ago
Way back in 2020 (when consoles were only $399 & $499 respectively) I was saying they should release a FULL back-compat PS5 for $1000.
Now that's just the price for a PS5 Pro and doesn't even include a disc drive....
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u/Reporting4Booty 2d ago
I don't think bundling the Emotion Engine, Cell, the PS3 GPU, and finding a place to fit them on the board, plus wire them up correctly so that they can work in tandem, can ever be worth the effort for Sony even if it were to sell like gangbusters. They would have to resume production, need like 6 different types of machines for each process. It's bordering on impossible.
Unless you meant emulation, in which case you can just do that with a modded PS5 (hence this thread).
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u/jigsaw1024 2d ago
Integrating the older chips is not the hard part. The hard part would be to manufacture the older chips again. You can't just go and plop the designs down on a newer node. And you would want to put the older chips on newer (not leading) nodes so they use less power.
Integrating them would be relatively easy from an engineering point: put the chips on the PCIe bus, and have the PS5 CPU act as a virtual chipset for access to inputs, outputs, memory, and storage. They would need a chip that sits between the PCIe bus and the older chips to package up the system calls to transport over PCIe to the PS5 CPU and back.
The original PS3 had a whole PS2 chip on it so it could run PS2 games natively. Eventually the chip was removed for cost savings, and PS2 games were run in emulation. If they could do that then, they could do more now.
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u/System0verlord 1d ago
Except for the disk reading part. The Blu-ray drives lack the lasers required to read CDs. That, and controller ports (or really just a couple first party USB adapters) are the only hardware changes they’d need to make if they keep with emulation.
I’d love a ‘1 ‘2 ‘3 ‘4 ‘5 PlayStation, just like Johnny Cash’s Cadillac though.
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u/Michael60814 2d ago
It always possible to back support games. However, this will hurt their greedy sales thinking. Sony is planning to remaster and remake of these old games for third parties and then to release a graphic upgrade version to let you pay another time.
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u/flappysack- 2d ago
Just buy a PC and put Ubuntu on there. You'll own your games forever and it will be great.
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u/SCphotog 2d ago
Makes me gleefully happy to see these giant, shitty, corporations get the finger.
Fuck Sony, and fuck Microsoft too.
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u/GlammBeck 1d ago
Does that mean we can get audio CD playback?
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u/Tortahegeszto 1d ago
No, that would require a laser made for CDs which is physically not present in PS5 drives. Therefore no PS1 disc compatibility either.
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u/idothinksotim 1d ago
Sony are assholes anyway, the PS4 has a cd laser but was never given firmware to actually utilise the cd functionality in any way.
Bizarre and really annoying
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u/ishsreddit 2d ago
The hell, thats incredible. It is beyond me why not just make it offficial then.
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u/TheGoldenMonkey 2d ago
So they can resell you the games you already own and/or make you pay for their subscription. I've got a handful of games that I bought on the PS3 that can't be played on PS4/PS5.
It's never about the consumer's convenience. It's always about control and profit for the company.
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u/Gammarevived 2d ago
It's more about licensing actually.
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u/TheGoldenMonkey 2d ago
Sure - that's a part of it. And they could pursue those licenses and/or negotiate to update them to let the consumer who purchased the game play what they bought. Or hell even charge $5 to play it on PS4/5.
But they don't. And they haven't. They've locked any semblance of "backwards compatibility" behind their subscription service.
Let's not pretend like games and media don't re-license or change licenses at the drop of a hat when they want to. They would just rather you pay for their subscription service so they can look good to their shareholders.
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u/WetShrimpFart 2d ago
I just want to play GTA4
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u/Strazdas1 19h ago
The PC version works fine with no compatibility issues (at least it did about 3 months ago lasts i played). Heck, they even removed games for windows live and some of the rendering issues (like last mission being impossible at above 30 fps).
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u/ash_ninetyone 1d ago
Can't wait for Sony to, instead of either providing this free in an update to incorporate software emulation, or hell even out of greed, sell this as a service, they just issue a DMCA takedown notice and brick things to shit on everyone
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u/SlicedBreadBeast 1d ago
I do appreciate what people have done with Sony and Adobe and over things recently. All these company pushing AI and sitting on their hands otherwise, I can’t wait for the come uppings
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u/Candid-Towel4759 9h ago
Sony didn’t refuse too. And this isn’t natively. They jailbroke it and installed an emulator.
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u/Denial_Jackson 2d ago
I imagine like they could build a PC.
A PC is terrible too, but these locked systems are just terrible awful.
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u/sousuke42 2d ago
Wow... we really regressed this much huh... its a legal issue not a technical issue. Gaming is a weird beast. The publishing and licensing needs to be on that machine for the games to be playable. Ps2 games are not licensed to be played in ps5. Ps3 was able to play ps2 as it had ps2 hardware. Once all hardware was dropped it had to license every game they put on the system. This is what happened with ps1 on psp, and psvita.
The legal hoops that have to be cleared to get games that no longer have accessible publishers to get the a-ok stops this. The amount of money and time into contracting all these games to be playable is a nightmare.
Thats why they dont do it. 3rd party people like this dont need to do that. But sony cant ignore the legal ramifications of just doing that.
God damn...
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u/lukaszpi 2d ago
...they can't do this or that. Mate they can do whatever they wan with the money they have. What they actually do is pure politics playing so things are always in their favor
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u/Saranshobe 2d ago
What stupid lisensing issues do they have in making killzone, resistance, PS3 ratchet and clank, god of war 1 and 2 playable on ps5? Their own games?
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u/sousuke42 2d ago edited 2d ago
Thats not what was being discussed. What you did was the fallacy of moving the goal post. We are talking about making ps2 disc readable. And letting a generic emulator playing the games.
If sony did that then every game will be bootable and will run. Games that they have no licensing agreement in place which would get them sued.
The drm of ps2 disc is not single issued/authored to each disc. Its generic as it is hardware based. And if sony allows it for 1st party games there is no stopping it when it comes to 3rd party games as there is no way for the system to know what it actually is reading.
Thats whats stopping them.
But thats no even all. Music. Voice actors, game engines would all need to be incensed again. No license is in perpetuity when it comes to music, voice actors and game engines.
And im not arguing against emulation. Personally i would love the ps6 to play ps1, ps2, ps3, ps4, ps5, psp, and psvita games. Would love nothing more. What I am arguing is the level of ignorance and stupidity of this head line that states sony is refusing to do something. Right... that is just beyond ridiculously stupid and just shows the person is a hater and just wants to keep fanning flames.
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u/ClaspedDread 2d ago edited 2d ago
But, the PS3 did this exact thing with PS1 games. The PS3 doesn't have any PS1 hardware inside it, it uses a generic software emulator, but almost every single PS1 game ran on that emulator using the physical PS1 discs.
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u/sousuke42 2d ago
And that depends on a lot of what was going on with those ps1 games. Its always in the details.
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u/Sure-Agent-2649 1d ago
You sound like you know something, but mostly you are just spitting bullshit…
Sony is the owner of the operating system, so they would be able to specify which games would be able to run and which don’t…
Your licensing nonsense excuse is laughable.
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u/sousuke42 1d ago
Lol you jave no fucking clue what you are talking about. Go and learn the ps2 drm, hell, ps1 drm and ps3 drm and ps4 drm and ps5 drm. When you realize that all ps1 doscs has the same drm, all the ps2 discs have the same drm, all the ps3 doscs have the same drm, all the ps4 discs has the same drm, and all the ps5 discs have the same drm come back and delete your post. I doubt you'd want to keep it up.
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u/TheGoldenMonkey 1d ago
DRM isn't the same as licensing. Related? Yes. Not the same.
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u/sousuke42 1d ago edited 1d ago
Never said they were. Do you generally fail this badly at reading comprehension?
You cannot add a ps1 emulator that can only read selective discs. You cannot create a ps2 emulator that reads selective discs. You cannot create a ps3 emulator that reads selective discs. You cannot create a ps4 emulator that reads selective discs. You cannot create a ps5 emulator that reads selective discs.
This plays into the licensing. The moment you create a emulator that can read ps1 discs, any disc is playable. Same as ps2, ps3, ps4, and ps5. Which means you need the licensing for all those games. Sony cannot make an emulator that only reads their first party ps1 game discs, their first party ps2 game discs, etc etc.
Hence why they havent done it. Cause they cant without having the licensing agreements in place or else its a legal nightmare. Thats all it ever been a legal issue. Not an incompetence issue, not a greed issue. Its all a legal issue. Thats what its always been. Hence more than likely why, what was it year or 2 ago that sony announced all the names to their next 2 or so systems. That was for getting licensing issues sorted out ahead of time. We were like no shit thats the name, but behind the scenes? All legal issues concerning supporting backwards compatibility.
Let me just say for blu-ray its a little bit more involved. Blu-ray has keys. But they are generic. A bunch of games share a key. But not all games share the same key. As newer games have different keys. Think of it as generations. Games released in the first year all have the same key. Games released in the second year have different keys than the first year but all 2nd year games have the same key. Thats an over simplified explanation but thats essentially how blu-ray drm works. So as long as you have access to the key you can read any game that shares that key. But ps1 and ps2 is completely hardware. For ps1 there is an over scan area that has the wobble information for the system to read. And ps2 is something very similar. You beat this hardware check and all games just work. You make it so the system can properly read it all games work.
So therr is no way for sony to specifically make an individual game just work while another won't. Especially for ps1 and ps2. For ps3, ps4 and ps5 its a but different but not by much. Get a hold of the decrypt for those keys and the games work. But again many discs uses the same keys. So there is no proper way to say just all of sony's 1st party games can be playable. Cause inevitably games sharing the keys will be playable.
So if you are going to talk I suggest you learn the topic at least a little bit, yeah? It will do you good.
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u/Kyanche 2d ago
But thats no even all. Music. Voice actors, game engines would all need to be incensed again. No license is in perpetuity when it comes to music, voice actors and game engines.
I'm not a lawyer, but I think that would only be an issue if they were to start selling those games again.
But if not, what do they gain from putting in the effort and R&D money to make emulators for ps1,2,3,4 run on PS5? Goodwill, I suppose. It might make people happy they could have 1 machine plugged into their TV and reliably play everything they own.
It would be amusing if they decided to re-release some random PS1 games without changing anyyything. Just renewing all the licenses and stamping out CDs again hahaha.
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u/Islu64 2d ago
I'm not saying you are lying because i can't say for certain that this isn't true, but that's complete nonsense. Nintendo, microsoft, sega or sony itself didn't need to license any game to make any of their consoles backwards compatible with the previous ones, both in the cases of consoles that had used hardware from the previous console, and in the case of the ones that didn't. Sony doesn't need to license, for example, resident evil 4's PS2 version to let you play it on a PS5, because they wouldn't be selling resident evil 4's ps2 version, and they wouldn't be modding the game in any way, they would be just letting you play the copy you already own through an emulator they would have developed, an emulator that is developed to emulate ps2 as a whole, not to play an specific ps2 game.
The presence of hardware from the previous console inside the new one is irrelevant. Sony owns the hardware and its patents anyways.
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u/LurkerFrom 2d ago
I kinda don't give a fuck about that as a customer. If I get less — I get less, reasons don't matter. Licensing is the company's problem, not mine
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u/Chipay 1d ago edited 1d ago
That's entirely untrue...
Playing a game from a disc is not legally outlawed, Sony owns the rights to the PS2 OS and its BIOS/firmware, it owns the rights that make reading encrypted discs possible.
The rights of the game owners/publishers are not infringed upon. Their works are not being copied, just read, without bypassing the on-disk DRM. Reading a disc and executing its code is not illegal.
Seriously, what are you arguing here? That licenses were made for a specific machine? Switch 1 games are playable on the Switch 2, did Nintendo have to re-license all games? GBA games are playable on the GameCube, DS and DS lite. Hell, they played original Game Boy and Game Boy Color games as well! It must have taken billions to re-license games, and some of those were over 20 years old! The legal difficulty Nintendo had to go through to contact every tiny game dev to re-license their game so that it may run on every new device must have been the greatest work in legislature since the American Declaration of Independence and the Napoleonic Code.
Or, maybe, Nintendo owns the software, trademarks, boot codes and everything else necessary to play Game Boy games and they didn't need anyone's permission to have the GBA play older games.
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u/Faithfulwanderlust 2d ago
is this for PS4 as well? I’m just going to homebrew the hell out this machine and never buy from Sony again.
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u/Wiseon321 1d ago
So, here is the funny part here:
People will go through the loops to get a ps5, do all of this, and then not be able to connect to the internet. So they won’t be able to get any of the most popular games, and day 1 patches will be unavailable for disc games.
But it’s “neat” they can do this, so hey who cares right?
And by that I mean: just go buy a ps2 they are like 70 dollars or something lol
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u/severedbrain 1d ago
They're no longer being made. Memory cards are getting rare. The CD Rom drive was flaky then and fails regularly. People are modding their PS2s to play digital games because the drives are failing.
Don't like it? Don't use it! Stop yucking someone else's yum!
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u/Diego-4747 2d ago
I never understood why backwards compatibility was so difficult for all these consoles when PCs have no issue running older games in emulators.
Maybe they just don’t want to put that much effort into supporting older games?
I mean my MacBook can easily upscale GameCube games to 1080p 60fps and they work great, so I don’t even need a console lol
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u/EdgiiLord 2d ago
Because before, companies had to either develop an emulator, which for earlier generations, took a lot of processing power, or take the PS2/3 route and essentially add the dedicated hardware inside the console, which costs more. As hardware started to mature, and emulators became mature (and FOSS with permissive licences), now it is feasible to do what the community does, but publishers don't want to risk cannibalising their own market, and to deliver a potential product with failures (because emulators are not 100% accurate).
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u/Diego-4747 2d ago
I think they just want to force you to buy the games again lol
I remember the Wii had Virtual Console, but you had to buy all the games again. You could only play GameCube games directly.
CPUs/GPUs have been fast enough for a while now to emulate older, slower consoles.
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u/Conjo_ 2d ago
I remember the Wii had Virtual Console, but you had to buy all the games again. You could only play GameCube games directly.
eh I mean making cartridge slots for the previous consoles and then only having a handful of games working would have been such a pointless exercise.
I think they just want to force you to buy the games again lol
but yeah, in the case of Sony at least. They had PS2 digital licenses on PS3 - they completely ignored those during PS4, because they added trophies to emulated PS2 games, so that was an excuse to make people pay for them again.
After the launch of the PS5 it seems like they respected the previous digital licenses of PS1/PS2 games? or at least I got access to the Syphon Filter PS1 game I had on my account before lol - not actually sure about PS2 games.
Well, there's that, and I imagine for physical PS1 and PS2 it might be difficult to make it in a way that they can guarantee you're not playing a pirated copy of a game.
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u/Diego-4747 2d ago
Sony and Xbox could easily support full backwards compatibility back to the PS1 and original Xbox if they wanted to, all they need is a CD/DVD drive and emulation software.
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u/Ploddit 2d ago
Because the actual market for multi-gen back compat isn't big enough to be worth the effort.
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u/Diego-4747 2d ago
So then people just pirate the games and emulate them on their PCs, so they make $0 instead lol
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u/Ploddit 2d ago
Are you talking about physical disc back compat or making their own emulators to run old games bought from Sony's store on modern PS hardware? They'd make no money from the former, and the latter is, as I said, a pretty small market.
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u/Diego-4747 2d ago
I mean a CD/DVD drive and emulation software would cost them very little to build in.
But I guess most people will just emulate on their PCs instead.
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u/Future_Calamity 2d ago
Another hack to play PS2 games is to buy a PS2
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u/smokeeater150 1d ago
Does a PS2 have HDMI support now?
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u/BighatNucase 1d ago
For the cost of a PS5 you could easily purchase either a modded PS2 or a PS2 + scalar. You could do this even pre-price hike.
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u/Red_Ryze_Alert 2d ago
…native PS2 Disc Support, excuse me wtf???? HOLY SHIT