PS3 - not backwards compatible?

[Submeg]

They are not thinking very clearly are they. Lets think.....People have what system right now? A PS2. So, they have games that run on....a PS2. So when the PS3 comes out, what games will they want to play? Games from the PS2. Oh, really? Well not all of them work....Well FU. I'll go buy an Xbox then.It will be funny when Sony realise their customers arent happy that they have to wait to play a PS3, seeing as everyone has been waiting for it to be released. I dont really feel like forking out another hundred bucks for a game.

[Harrison]

Except, look at the Xbox 360. Not many Xbox games work on an Xbox 360. Each game has to have emulation written specifically to support each title on the 360, so fans of each title have to hope and wait for the emulation for their favourite titles to be written.

The PS3 in contrast is aiming to eventually be backwardly compatible with all
PS2 titles. Consider how long most emulators such as WinUAE have been in development, and yet they are still not perfectly emulating everything. The PS2 is a very complete system to emulate, and even though Sony have the big advantage of knowing the system inside out, it will still take a lot of work with the software emulator to fully emulate the PS2 perfectly.

And as mentioned previously, doing this via software does mean they can keep working on it and improving it and releasing new firmware with better support. Something that would not be possible if the backwards compatibility was hardware based.

[Submeg]

Fair enough, I didnt know that. Interesting...well it will be cool when they can get a full PS2 emulator running...