I'm looking forwards to this as well

 

I really doubt they can churn out something like backwards compatibility that quickly. Sounds like something they had been cooking up themselves. Possible I guess they got word MS planned to do it before the announcement and went ahead. They already had an emulator for PS2 games working on the PS3, perhaps it wasn't that much work to move it over to the PS4?

Can't imagine they poured a lot of resources into this considering they have the PSNOW service for legacy games (albeit pricing is not that attractive).

 

Well, the slower the system is that you're emulating, the easier it is to emulate. It's not much of a surprise that Sony can get the PS4 to emulate PS2 games, given that the PS2 is far slower that the PS4. The PS2 had a sub-300MHz processor.

The PS3 on the other hand had a 3.2GHz processor. To get that working on a PS4, which has 1.6GHz cores, well, lets just say when it comes to single threaded performance we haven't seen that much of a bump between the PS3 -> PS4 generation as we saw from the PS2 -> PS3 generation. So, that means you need to have very clever people writing the emulator to squeeze very last bit of performance out of it.

 

I can't imagine emulating PS3 would be worth the effort. There seems to be a constant stream of PS4 remakes for the PS3 exclusives. Almost as though they know there are a bunch of gamers that didn't have a PS3 that makes an eager market for a simple remaster. Hardly even seems necessary to try to make emulation work. I might actually pick up Valkyria Chronicles remaster. Was one of my favorite PS3 games and it was released right at the start of the gen. That and Heavy Rain were both announced in the past week.

 

I can't imagine emulating PS3 would be worth the effort.

err, this is exactly what PSNow is. you can stream almost any ps3 game to play on PS4. it actually works great

 

Well, it may work great for some people, using streaming to play video games will always have additional latency, and has the obvious "you must always have a decently fast Internet connection" to play those games.

Local emulation is better in almost every way, and it's good that Sony's doing that for PS2 games. It'll be a pity if they cannot do that for PS3 games.

Going forward, I expect that if the consoles stick with x86 processors emulating your previous console won't be as much of an issue because there won't need to be any instruction set translation. This will have some benefits. Specifically, the console vendors will be able to update their hardware offerings more frequently without needing to worry about having the "barren software landscape" every time they push out better hardware. They could let their customers run their existing (or slightly patched) PS4 and Xbox One games at higher resolution and refresh rates. This is a feature that the PC gaming market has enjoyed for a long time now, and the console vendors would be crazy not to do it going forward.

AMD could conceivably offer both Sony and Microsoft updated hardware that can perfectly emulate the previous iteration of GCM graphics hardware and x86 chips have always been pretty slavish about backwards compatibility.

 

From what I've gathered, PS3 programming (and I guess by extension emulation) has always been a nightmare for studios. The PS4 is much easier and is more in line with a PS2 than a PS3.

Maybe that's why most studios are not bothering with making their PS3 titles available on the PS4 platform.

 

Has anyone heard if this is disc in console or do you have to buy the game online?

I have an extensive PS2 game collection. My PS2 is still hooked up and played on a semi regular basis.
Might finally be a reason to buy a PS4. Mostly for the wireless controller you can actually hold with out your hands burning.

 

odds are will have to buy/download the PS2 games. this considering that Sony did bring PS2 emulation back to PS3 but they only let you buy/download select PS2 games

 

My grown-up son has a PS4 and an XBox One but he still keeps his PS2 around for that console's God Of War version (he never cared for the later version of that game). I can't believe his old PS2 is still running.

For people who have the games but no longer have or want the PS2 console, I suppose the emulator is worth it.