With the release of Star Wars Battlefront this week Sony also tossed out a few old-school Star Wars games from the PS2 era. After further inspection, the wizards over at Digital Foundry realized that these games were not remastered ports, but rather were running on emulated PS2 firmware. What this means is that we have gotten our first look at the beginnings of the PS4 becoming backwards compatible! In an e-mail with Wired Magazine, Sony Computer Entertainment of America confirmed that they were, in fact, working on building a PS2 emulator inside of the PS4! How friggin' cool is that?!
On top of doing some fancy visual enhancing before scaling up the games to 1080P at 60 FPS, the emulator has some pretty tricky (and patented) information tracking software built into it so that PSN can add Trophies to existing PS2 titles. The one hang up I have with this is that getting more games ported over to be compatible will take a lot longer. If the firmware has to actually read the code as it is being accessed to know when a Trophy is achieved, then it will take a lot of extra digging.
This is all well and good for us PS4 users, but when are we going to get some better games than the three crappy Star Wars ones that come with the Star Wars Battlefront Bundle? (Fingers crossed for the TimeSplitters series.)
Source: Wired Magazine
