Here's a little bit of interesting news:
theregister.co.uk
Sony confesses PlayStation 2 won't play all PSX 1 games
Sony has admitted that the upcoming PlayStation 2 may not be quite as backwardly compatible as the consumer electronics giant has previously claimed.
According to a Bloomberg report, Sony Computer Entertainment director Kenichi Fukunaga said some older titles may not run on the new console after all.
Potential problems with the PlayStation 2's ability to play original PlayStation games was first mooted by Japanese gaming publisher Jiji Press. It claimed some games don't work with the new console's video system.
Fukunaga was unable to confirm why this should be an issue here, instead claiming that problem software was probably not written to "Sony standards" -- essentially games that bypass Sony's APIs and write directly to the hardware.
Fukunaga couldn't say how many of the 3000-odd PlayStation titles would not run. However, it's worth noting that the PlayStation-on-a-PC software Bleem! will run only around 300 PlayStation titles perfectly. While Bleem! (the company) has yet to test every single PlayStation game, most of the ones the do fail, either by refusing to run at all or with various graphical glitches, do so because they work directly with the game's hardware.
Of course, since Bleem! is merely a 'black-box' that behaves the way a PlayStation might, it's not a perfect test of PlayStation 2 backwards compatibility, but it does suggest that, since the two versions of the console are architecturally different, the degree of backwards compatibility may not be as high as Sony anticipated since a lot of titles won't find the hardware they expect to find.
Backwards compatibility problems are unlikely to dampen the PlayStation 2's sales too much, but they will come as a blow to existing PlayStation owners keen to upgrade and take their favourite games with them. ©
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