Lasse Penttinen
3 Sep 2003 9:49
Sony has today laid out an announcement that should please the existing Sony game console owners. The PS3 will continue the trend started by PS2 and will be backwards compatible with the older PlayStation generations.
Sony spokesman confirms that the backwards compatibility of PS2 vs. PSOne was one of the keys to the console’s success, as expectable. This also means that the PSOne game titles will have a product life cycle unseen before in the gaming industry. It is now confirmed that you can still enjoy the PSOne classics in the years to come, without the need of the original game console.
"PSone runs on the PlayStation 2 through emulation rather than actual hardware. PlayStation 3 will offer the same compatibility for PS2 software and the format will continue forever," he explained.As it seems that the so called 2nd generation consoles (PS2, Xbox, GameCube) will have a shorter life cycle than the original Playstation, also similar compatibility support is expected and hoped from Microsoft Xbox 2. Microsoft however is replacing the NVidia graphics hardware with ones manufactured by ATI and some believe this can be a problem.
"ATI's hardware runs the same sort of pixel shaders and so on that the NVIDIA chipset does," one graphics programmer working on Xbox games explained to us, "but getting the hardware to exactly mimic the behaviour of an NVIDIA part could be very tricky...The Register