Sony's PS2 adaptor patent explored

By Richard Leadbetter Published 14 September, 2010

Is this how back-compat returns to PS3?

Sony's answer to the problem of PS2 backwards compatibility for PS3 appears to be a case of repackaging the vast majority of the original hardware and supplying it as an all-new add-on.

The recently unearthed patent application, first revealed in the West by Siliconera and currently being dissected on Japanese gaming forums, describes how a "removable adaptor" is connected to a "next generation games machine". The not-so subtle codenames ("200" and "300") are clearly supposed to represent PS2 and PS3, though the patent could apply to any games machines going forward.

English-translated versions of the diagrams show us how Sony intends to make it work. The "200" box appears to be an almost entirely complete rendition of the original hardware: CPU, memory, graphics chip and RAM are in there, along with a bespoke module for DVD emulation (note that there is no actual optical drive). Inputs and outputs are routed through a hub that connects both to the "300" unit and a router.

'Sony's PS2 adaptor patent explored' Screenshot 1
'Sony's PS2 adaptor patent explored' Screenshot 2

English translations of the patent diagrams show us how the device attaches to the 'next generation games machine' and also reveal that the adaptor itself contains the vast majority of the PS2's hardware - everything short of the DVD drive, controller ports and AV outputs.

The real challenge here is bandwidth. The PS3's USB ports are capable of transferring around 35 megabytes per second at their maximum throughput level - no way is this fast enough to host an entire console. The fact that the hub appears to be handling Ethernet traffic suggests that Sony's solution to the bandwidth issue is to use the gigabit network port on the rear of the unit.

This offers a 125 megabyte per second connection between the host console and the "removable adaptor". The theory is that the PS2 game disc is inserted into the PS3 with data from the drive combined with input from the controller(s) being beamed over the LAN port. The adaptor then decodes the data and processes it exactly as a PS2 would. The output data is then transmitted back to the PS3.

Quite what form that data takes remains unknown, but an educated guess would be uncompressed video and audio which is then displayed (and perhaps upscaled) by the PS3: a 480p video signal at 24-bit RGB running at 60Hz would probably entail around 72MB of bandwidth with a minimal amount of overhead for audio. That's way beyond USB 2.0, but should be manageable via the gigabit Ethernet port.

It's possible that the encoder mentioned at point 212 could be compressing the image using something like MJPEG (as used by the PlayStation Eye's 60Hz throughput) and this would work over USB 2.0. However, any form of additional compression and decompression will badly impact image quality and it would not explain why the "removable adaptor" would require its own connection to the router at all. Logically speaking, the only reason it is there is because the PS3's own LAN port will be occupied by the adaptor itself, and the PS3 still needs support for a wired internet connection.

All told, it's a bit of a crazy scheme. This notion of effectively cramming an entire PS2 into a box you attach to your PlayStation 3 might seem like rampant overkill. However, we live in a world where electronics are radically shrinking year on year. If Microsoft can shrink its CPU and GPU onto a single, relatively low-power chip, then the notion of combining an entire PS2 into a single package isn't particularly far-fetched at all.

If there's any disadvantage to this idea, it'll almost certainly be the case that the games will be laggier than playing them on original hardware: all this traffic across LAN ports, perhaps combined with upscaling on the PS3 end must surely be adding latency you wouldn't get on the original PS2 itself.

However, it is worth remembering that this is merely a patent application, a method of protecting an idea and not necessarily any indication of any kind of final end product. However, it does provide a fascinating insight into the thoughts and processes going on at Sony Computer Entertainment.

Picture of Richard.

About Richard Leadbetter

Rich has been a games journalist since the days of 16-bit and specialises in technical analysis. Commonly known around Eurogamer as the Blacksmith of the Future.

Read more articles from Richard by visiting the Richard Leadbetter archive page.

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Comments (58) Latest comment 1 year ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Iain815 #1 1 year ago

    Okay, Lindsay, are you forgetting that I was a professional twice over — an analyst and a therapist. The world’s first analrapist.

    Sorry, I don't really know to do in these situations.

  • michaelangelo #2 1 year ago

    would actually consider buying this if it was say less than £50 and smaller than a ps2 slim. Although I think thats wishful thinking and theres too many factors that will probably make this device never see the light of day...

  • DarthInsinuate #3 1 year ago

    I think Richard Leadbetter uses the word 'rendition' a tad too much. It's not a big deal, but he uses it enough for it to be noticeable, and to bother really anal people.

    Suggested synonyms: 'Version', 'variant', and at a strech 'interpretation'.

  • lcmnick #4 1 year ago

    The point has been made millions of times before, but if Sony had have just seen out the early years with the PS2 capable PS3 (which I think they admitted removing PS2 BC didn't strip much from the cost), they wouldn't have to go through this nonsense, and they'd have 38 million PS2 capable PS3's out in the wild.

    The very fact that Sony are working on this show that they know PS2 BC is an issue, so when someone from Sony says that PS2 BC isn't important, mabe they can be quized as to why Sony are coming up with solutions to solve the problem; when they had the solution four years ago shipping in PS3s.

  • peterfll #5 1 year ago

    How did Sony go about getting the GOW collection running on the PS3? Is the original PS2 code running through some sort of software emulation or did Sony recompile the original code to work on the PS3?

    I would be genuinely surprised if the PS2 could not be emulated in software on the PS3 (if not today, then eventually)?

  • carrotcake #6 1 year ago

    peter... the gow collection is a ps3 game, yep they recoded it for ps3.

    and yeah, I was thinking about plugging ps2 hardware into a ps3 before this patent came up. if they can't do software emulation and they aren't putting ps2 hardware inside the console then it has to be outside the console... it's like a sega 32x with its own processor... except going through lan because we have no cartridge/expansion slot!

  • Cappy #7 1 year ago

    The God of War games were coded in C, recompiling to new target hardware rather than emulation was all that was necessary.

  • Zaiz #8 1 year ago

    Actually, why can't they do software emulation? Put the main processor in as the CPU and have the cell processors run the emulation. This is probably all down to the SPUs being bad at anything except "basic" operations, like physics and graphics.

  • Lord_Gremlin #9 1 year ago

    Why bother when you can buy a cheap PS2? I'd rather try to preserve my PS3's optical drive and use a PS2. Now, if they'd sell PS2 games in PS Store, like PS1 classics, that will be another story.

  • Sevens #10 1 year ago

    "However, it does provide a fascinating insight into the thoughts and processes going on at Sony Computer Entertainment."

    That's true. Any interest in hardware-based (independent) backwards compatibility is a relatively good sign.

  • KungFuSpoon #11 1 year ago

    This might sound like a crazy idea but why not sell an improved/updated version the emulation software they put in the PS3 around 2007?

    Sure it was buggy but they've had three years to improve on it, if MS can get an entirely software solution working on the 360 under the legal restrictions they faced working to an acceptable level for Xbox games. Then why can't Sony who entirely own the design for the PS2 get a solution working on the more powerful PS3 to emulate the PS2 which is less powerful than the Xbox anyway.
    Edited by 1 at 14/09/10 @ 21:53

  • Killerbee #12 1 year ago

    @Lord_Gremlin:

    Why bother when you can buy a cheap PS2?

    But your PS2 won't upscale to 1080p like the PS3 could. Also you have the advantage of a single connection to the PS3 (and maybe a power lead?) rather than having all that plus the need to trail another set of wires to your TV, and your old wired Dualshock 2 trailing from the console to your seat. There are lots of advantages as far as I can see.

  • NorUraeus #13 1 year ago

    @KungFuSpoon: I can not believe that misconception is still alive, there has NEVER been a pure software emulation of the PS2 in PS3 systems. The European model had software emulation for the CPU (Emotion Engine), but a hardware GPU (Graphics Synthesizer). So the reason BC went away was because Sony after dropping the hardware PS2 GPU they have not been able to do software emulation of it and thus no BC.

  • JohnnyWashnGo #14 1 year ago

    Oooh new hardware to play with... if this materialises anytime soon I will be buying one. But only if it performs some kind of upscaling of the image. Otherwise I will stick to the PS2 slim.

    Very interesting solution to a tricky problem.

  • zedzee #15 1 year ago

    Oh my God this is f*cking complicated!

    Does Sony not have the brains to shrink the PS2 guts into one ARM-based emulation chip, running on a USB 2.0 stick and shove that into a USB port on the PS3?!

    I'd have personally stuck with the software emu idea, rather than alienate sooo many customers and push them into the arms of Microsoft and Nintendo.

    Ludicrous design!
    Edited by 1 at 14/09/10 @ 22:54

  • lancashirered #16 1 year ago

    Right ignore the PS2 for a minute! I'm thinking how Sony may of shot themselves in the foot by using the cell. All those lovely PSN titles you've bought will be worthless in 3/5/10 years time if the PS4 can't emulate the PS3! Now the cell is powerful, but also very specialised, and now IBM has stopped cell development sony might be thinking ahead.
    Edited by 1 at 14/09/10 @ 23:16

  • darkmorgado #17 1 year ago

    peter... the gow collection is a ps3 game, yep they recoded it for ps3.

    Actually they just upscaled it. Well, apart from the FMV.

  • darkmorgado #18 1 year ago

    After the leaked minutes from a SEGA meeting last year, this is obviously just the end result of a money-making decision.

    a) Remove backwards-compatibility.
    b) Publicly give the reason as "cost-saving" while admitting internally it was due to wanting to monetise their back-catalogue (as per the SEGA leaked minutes).
    c) Start releasing upscaled versions of their back catalogue to sell to people who own the originals.
    d) then release an add-on, charging money for a feature that they originally provided for free.

    This has f*ck all to do with cost-saving or giving the consumer what they want, and everything to do with milking every last drop out of the consumer.

  • Number1Laing #19 1 year ago

    Does Sony not have the brains to shrink the PS2 guts into one ARM-based emulation chip, running on a USB 2.0 stick and shove that into a USB port on the PS3?!

    Did you not read the article? USB is too slow.

    I'd have personally stuck with the software emu idea

    I am fairly certain Leadbetter has pointed this out on occasion, but I think there's a bandwidth issue there too.

  • dsmx #20 1 year ago

    Cell processors are designed to work together so the PS4 could simple use more cell processors, put 3 or 4 in the PS4, job done.

  • darkmorgado #21 1 year ago

    Cell processors are designed to work together so the PS4 could simple use more cell processors, put 3 or 4 in the PS4, job done.

    They would also need to upgrade the GPU though. A cpu by itself does not have the horsepower to deal with all the modern graphics effects by itself. This is why we have so many face-offs giving the sdvantage to the 360 because it has the superior graphics chip.

    My guess is that the next gen consoles will have a 4-core gpu with a dual GPU config and dedicated ram, and 500gb HDD as standard. Most gaming PCs are already moving beyond that, but this seems a reasonable spec compared to current gen.
    Every gen, consoles are actually moving closer and closer to PC configurations as far as hardware is concerned. The problem is that they will, as far as sheer horsepower is concerned, always be playing catchup to computers as consoles are static, and I doubt we will ever see a fully open and upgradeable console as it defeats the point.

  • dsmx #22 1 year ago

    I didn't bring up the GPU because that's something we know nothing about. But we do know that sony will almost certainly use cell in the PS4, they spent billions developing it and bought the factory that makes them. That is why I only mentioned the cell there's not really any info on what else sony will do.

    Sony could go two ways, either make it easier on devs by adopting a similar CPU/GPU configuration that the xbox 360 has or go down the route of the PS3 where you can offload GPU tasks to the cell processor so all the current tech devs have made for the ps3 will work with the ps4.

    Each way has it's advantages and disadvantages and what sony does will be quite interesting.

  • darkmorgado #23 1 year ago

    But we do know that sony will almost certainly use cell in the PS4, they spent billions developing it and bought the factory that makes them.

    I recall the same being said about the Emotion chip.

  • darkmorgado #24 1 year ago

    Plus, they may own the factory that makes the cell, but they don't own the design. They contracted it out rather than designed it themselves.

  • darkmorgado #25 1 year ago

    But I agree with your post, it will be very interesting to see how the next gen turns out in terms of architecture. To be honest, given the amount of criticism Sony came under this gen for making such a hard platform to develop for, I am guessing that they will make things a lot easier next time round. We'll see.

  • dsmx #26 1 year ago

    My impression from what devs have said about the ps3 was that the cell wasn't that hard to code for it just required a different approach to how you put tasks into the processor. If you actually tried the performance you could get out of the cell was astounding.

  • Eoin #27 1 year ago

    Actually, why can't they do software emulation?

    The main issue is the PS2's GPU, the Graphics Synthesizer. The design is a bit strange - it focuses on pixel fillrate and getting data to the screen as quickly as possible, instead of graphical processing features, and was designed around this mentality. As a result, despite not being particularly powerful as a processor, it includes 4MB of extraordinarily fast embedded RAM, with a ridiculously huge address bus attached to that RAM. The bandwidth between the processor and that embedded RAM is 48 gigabytes per second, a figure which is decent today and was utterly insane by the standards of 10 years ago.

    The PS3's graphics chip is much more standard, with a bandwidth between the processor and the graphics memory of 22.4 gigabytes per second.

    This means that, although the PS3's graphics chip is massively more advanced, in one aspect, it's actually significantly inferior to the PS2's graphics chip, and that just happens to be the single aspect that the PS2's graphics chip was designed around.

    Overcoming this obstacle is, to say the least, nontrivial. Without wanting to throw around terms like "impossible", it is almost certainly not worth it for Sony to dedicate whatever resources may be necessary to circumvent it. As a result, even if it is technically possible, I highly doubt that we will ever see the PS3 do generic software emulation of the PS2 (specific software emulation of a relatively small set of games may be feasible, especially games from early on in the PS2's life when many developers had no real idea of how to properly utilise the Graphics Synthesizer).

    This is why we've seen Sony go from full hardware emulation, to partial hardware emulation where the only PS2 hardware included in the PS3 was the GPU, to zero emulation when the GPU was removed, and potentially to this strange patent where the GPU is once again included. If they could get PS2 emulation up and running in software, there's absolutely every reason to think that they would have done so by now, since it would enable them to sell PS2 games on PSN alongside the existing range of PSone games.

  • womble #28 1 year ago

    I think this is a legal tactic, nothing more.

    Sony are clearly NOT interested in PS2 emulation of any kind. There's no money in it for them.

    Instead, they want to sell NEW product, including remakes of existing IP. That's where the real money is.

  • Number1Laing #29 1 year ago

    @darkmorgado: I am 99% sure Sony sold their Cell operations to Toshiba a number of years ago. And IBM recently made a statement saying, basically, the Cell is a dead end for them. Honestly, the tea leaves are pointing to Sony moving away from Cell, not making further investments into it.

  • darkmorgado #30 1 year ago

    Honestly, the tea leaves are pointing to Sony moving away from Cell, not making further investments into it.

    I completely agree. All the hot air about how it was the future of computing when it first came out is just that - hot air.

  • Kaminari #31 1 year ago

    I'll keep my YUV PS2 thank you.

  • Retro_ #32 1 year ago

    Bet this is gathering dust in Sony HQ never to be seen again.

  • mrvinny000 #33 1 year ago

    Ps2 B/C doesn't work very well anyway on Ps3 . My R&C & SSX collection all either freeze after 5 mins or suffer image/sound/control latency that makes them unplayable. My original played them fine but since the forced 3.0 firmware & my 5th replacement 60g (3 ylods & 2 disc drive failures ) my fave games on B/C now refuse to play as they used to. If a new bit of kit got them working i'd be gratefull as finding a new Ps2 is proving troublesome & i bought a 60g to do everything not say it does & fails , its not an Xbox now is it.

  • jrockey #34 1 year ago

    @Number1Laing IBM said they weren't going to develop the 32 SPE Cell, but that they are continuing to develop other parts of the Cell family. Reference: [link url=htt p://www.hardwareheaven.com/news.php?newsid=344
    ]http://ww w.hardwareheaven.com/news.php?n...[/link]

  • kangarootoo #35 1 year ago

    @zedzee

    "Oh my God this is f*cking complicated!"

    Which I guess is why you have so totally failed to unserstand it, even when someone else has written it all down for you.

  • Cappy #36 1 year ago

    "Ps2 B/C doesn't work very well anyway on Ps3"

    Correction.

    PAL PS2 B/C doesn't work very well anyway on a PAL PS3.

    The PAL region never got full compatibility, every single PS2 game I've tried works perfectly on my imported NTSC PS3. I'm not just talking about a few games here I've probably booted and played well over a hundred games. Makes the PS1 compatibility look rather disappointing in comparison.

    The only problem title I've come across so far is Resident Evil Outbreak which crashes a bit too much for my liking.

  • Alestes #37 1 year ago

    @designerheadache, I don't think they cut down price much by removing BC from the hybrid hardware/software emulation solution they offered here in Europe. All the PS2 BC required was the Graphics Synthesizer chip and as Sony own it I'm pretty sure it added less than $5 to each PS3. The PS2 tech is a decade old now and dirt cheap. If one buy a PS2 today, the costs are for the DVD drive and the controller, not the processing hardware.

  • Retroid #38 1 year ago

    If Sony *are* doing this and it actually gets to market, they'd best take the opportunity to do some emulation-style rendering at higher resolutions.

    No, I'm not talking about the PS3's hit-and-miss (to put it kindly) PS2 480p-image-resized-to-1080p-with-filters upscaling, I'm talking about actually rendering the polygons at the increased resolutions.

    If this box does that.... then I will buy this. I've got my PS2 hooked up via component to my TV and it looks quite rough, truth be told. But that's mostly the resolution and lack of AA. If these games were being rendered in HD they'd still look pretty good, as DF's article on Shadow of the Colossus showed months back.

  • Psiloc #39 1 year ago

    In my experience the BC on the 60GB model was pretty satisfactory by the end of the compatibility updates. I miss it.

  • cherryuk #40 1 year ago

    No point the display will looks pants on a HD screen. anyway as I've tried a component on PS2 to HD, looks shockingly poor!

  • ProtoformX #41 1 year ago

    Killerbee's comment about having the wire from the Dualshock 2 trailing on the floor as a negative point is quite interesting. It wasn't that long ago that all controllers were wired and now that's being perceived as a negative thing. Purely in personal experience, I never found an instance where a controller wire wasn't long enough.

  • mono_eric3 #42 1 year ago

    I would put up the Sega Power Base Converter, the Super Game Boy and the Master Gear Converter as prior art.
    ;)

  • rprince #43 1 year ago

    @Cappy, the GoW games being coded in C doesn't make it any easier to recompile for a different system. The architecture is completely different!

    This external PS2 idea is clearly ridiculous and must have been an old idea that has been protected just in case. If it were cheap enough to made an external dongle, it would be put on the PS3 motherboard and backwards compatibility included as standard.

    I don't quite get why software emulation was stopped. These claims of bandwidth differences are interesting, but is that the real reason? Is there any real evidence of this, other than 2 completely non-related numbers being different between PS2 and PS3?

    If you were emulating the GS, you wouldn't try to map that to the architecture of the graphics card of the PS3, unless it were an upgraded version of the same architecture (which it very much isn't). You would emulate all of it's functions on the CPU and keep it's memory in main memory. However, presumably the Cell's distributed nature of data and code puts a stopper on emulating the PS2 in a generic way, as distributing the data to particular Cell SPUs requires knowledge of the data and whether it can be processed together or not.

  • RedPanda #44 1 year ago

    Post deleted at 14:31:59 28-01-2012

  • Retroid #45 1 year ago

    @cherryuk

    Hence my comments about actually rendering at the higher resolution rather than just resizing.

  • funkateer #46 1 year ago

    "If Sony *are* doing this and it actually gets to market, they'd best take the opportunity to do some emulation-style rendering at higher resolutions. "

    As much as I'd like to see that, I'm pretty sure you can forget about it. It would basically mean a new version of the PS2 GPU with more memory (and thus much higher development costs) and possibly (probably) lower compatibility.

    For best results, 'GOW collection style' recompiled PS2 games for PS3 are the way to go.
    And if Sony would be a bit more cunning, they'd recompile those games for X360 and WII too while they're at it.

  • Caimbeul #47 1 year ago

    Thankfully i have a 1st gen PS3 that will play PS2 games.

  • photoboy #48 1 year ago

    Personally I'm not at all interested in this sort of solution. My biggest problem with the PS2 has always been image quality and resolution. I've never seen any actual figures but I'm convinced many PS2 games are actually rendering internally at sub-480i and are then upscaled to 480i on output. Compared to the sharp and clean output of the Dreamcast the PS2's graphics are usually a blurry low-res mess. Even games like Resident Evil 4 running in 480p mode do not look anywhere near as sharp on PS2 as on the GameCube. Plus Sony introduced a nasty screen blending effect after all the complaints about the PS2's lack of anti-aliasing, which washes out the picture and reduces detail.

    What I want from Sony is backwards compatibility that offers high-resolution rendering and improved framerates, which would require a PS2 emulator. Upscaling a 480p image from legacy hardware won't provide much extra detail, but an emulator rendering at 720p certainly will. I would have thought the power of the Cell more than capable of PS2 emulation including the graphics chip, but maybe Sony have spent the past few years trying and they can't manage it. Either that or they want to make money flogging old PS2 hardware...
    Edited by 1 at 15/09/10 @ 18:23

  • Osmond #49 1 year ago

    no chance of this being produced its far too late in the cycle and utterly pointless if over £20 in cost. Also im sure sony will release and make plenty more money from (than say pre owned ps2 titles for this device) selling the ps2 line up over PSN .

  • Cappy #50 1 year ago

    "@Cappy, the GoW games being coded in C doesn't make it any easier to recompile for a different system. The architecture is completely different!"

    Actually being coded in C does. We've already established that straight emulation of the PS2 is a challenge, that's not how it was done. The reason the two God of War games were ported to the PS3 so quickly and easily is because the source code was in C.

    If you've ever compiled your own applications you've surely seen that you can make builds to suit different hardware configurations.
    Edited by 1 at 15/09/10 @ 22:11

  • Accordi0n #51 1 year ago

    not that i think i had anything to do with the creation of this , i did post this exact idea to the PS Blog ideas submission way back when the site opened…

    i also wrote about a PS2 with built in upscaling/720p rendering…

  • rprince #52 1 year ago

    @Cappy: Ah ya see, that's where I went wrong. I've never compiled anything myself, so was just making shit up... ;-)

    Really just about every modern video game written is in C or C++ (sweeping statement!) so saying that GoW was is no real revelation. Yes you can cross-compile your code to different processors, but this is easier for PCs because they largely have the same architecture. Technically you could compile any programming language (C, Java, Python, Scheme, brainfuck) into an intermediate language, then in turn convert that into any machine code you like.

    However, different architectures have different optimisations, and the PS2 architecture is somewhat different from PC architectures and the PS3 is vastly different to anything else! The PS2 has one main processor and some memory which allows it to run some code, and also has a graphics processor which has two co-processors (vector units in PS2 parlance, a bit like modern day shaders).

    The PS3 has a graphics card more like a modern day PC, which supports a number of generic shader units, which have code very different to the PS2 vector units, so that would have to be ported for a start (it's definitely not in C). Then the code which ran on the single PS2 processor may be cross-compiled to run on the PPE of the Cell, but that's not necessarily going to be fast enough to be playable, meaning parts of the code have to be rewritten to be farmed to the SPUs, meaning it's not a straight cross-compilation.

    It could be a little easier if Santa Monica Studio had already ported the GoW engine to PS3 (i.e. had rewritten the platform specific parts, not just cross-compiled it), then the rest of the game code could be transferred from the PS2 version of the engine to the PS3 engine, but even then it would involve a fair amount of work... and would mean it was possible due to the game being written on a cross-platform engine, regardless of what language that engine was written in.

  • womble #53 1 year ago

    @crappy: "Actually being coded in C does. We've already established that straight emulation of the PS2 is a challenge, that's not how it was done. The reason the two God of War games were ported to the PS3 so quickly and easily is because the source code was in C."

    Not really. The language involved isn't that much of an issue. Certainly, having it as C helps (as opposed to some machine-generated C-from-asm that I've ported) but a much bigger issue is the platform specifics. i.e. what SDKs and machine-specific calls and assumptions were made.

    Porting older games to modern consoles is typically a HUGE task. There's basic differences at every single level, from the APIs to controller features, cpu/gpu performance, the tools, memory, resolutions, middleware availability, PSN and XBL connectivity, etc.

  • Ashcroft #54 1 year ago

    no chance of this being produced its far too late in the cycle and utterly pointless if over £20 in cost. Also im sure sony will release and make plenty more money from (than say pre owned ps2 titles for this device) selling the ps2 line up over PSN .

    The point of this device would be to sell PS2 games on the PSN. If they could emulate the PS2 in software, they would. They want to sell PS2 games, so they've got no reason to not make PS2 BC in software. They've obviously been unable to make it work, hence they're having ideas like this.

  • Retroid #55 1 year ago

    PS2 games over PSN (surely one of the great missed opportunities!) and budget PS2 releases & compilations.

  • vizzini #56 1 year ago

    Personally, I think the 300 console(Next generation system) in these diagrams is actually a mobile phone and not a ps3 that supplies the 200 console (miniaturised Ps2) with access to power, a screen, read/write storage, audio in/out and a controller/keypad.

    I said a while back on Eurogamer I wanted a Playstation mobile that used a KVM switch(Keyboard, Video Mouse) option, to isolate the phone from the portable gaming.

    This patent would be far more ambitious than the playstation phone I wanted, as they could potentially make every new mobile phone from all manufacturers (except Apple) into KVM capable playstation 2s; provided the phone had the right interface connector and supported magicgate memory stick.

    The size of that portable gaming market would be huge, and sony would have the back catalogue to sell through a mobile PSN and the profits from ever 200 console adaptor every phone needed.

  • SeesThroughAll #57 1 year ago

    Clearly, at this point it has become clear that Sony has chosen to take the "remastered classics in HD" route. And it makes sense too. The PS2 (and maybe the PS3 as well) might be fully software emulated in future hardware, pretty much in the same way the PS1 currently is.

  • YenRug #58 1 year ago

    My thought:

    Why not put the GPU on a USB stick then emulate the rest in software on the PS3?

    It sounds like the USB port has enough bandwidth for the GPU data, that way you wouldn't have to worry about the rest of the hardware. If the problem is that the bandwidth has to be split between input and output, you could possibly create a dongle with two plugs on small leads, one dedicated to input, the other dedicated to output.