PlayStation has created a Game Preservation team!

[Elvick_]

2 hours ago, Stevieboy said:

 

Would a PS5 be capable of running it though?

I don't see why it couldn't play some rather than zero. Particularly with the idea that existing emulators on PC are made by those without any intimate knowledge of the PS3. Sony themselves have access to far more information and people who should be able to do emulation better (and faster) than people who have to work from an outsider perspective. 

 

From what I've seen of PS3 emulation on PC, it's still got a lot of room for improvement. But if Sony actually was wanting to do it, they could figure out what is needed for an emulator to work and literally build their console in a way that supports it. Rather than just build a console the way they want the console to be. It's very clear that Sony do not care about b/c at all, and only begrudgingly support PS4 since there's no excuse. But there's no excuse for PSone or PS2 either, it's just people don't make as much of a fuss for those games as they do for PS3. Despite it being more than capable of emulating both of those. That they can't even let us use PSone discs, because they can't even be bothered to make their consoles read CDs (PS4 and PS5 don't), it's not surprising they aren't doing anything with PS3 b/c.

 

I think rather than people demanding PS3 so much they should harp on PSone and PS2. There's no excuses for those not being supported. PS3 could do both through software, and while the software emulation on PS3 wasn't as good as having the chip itself it's better than having absolutely nothing. Once we win the battle on PSone and PS2 then it looks even stupider that PS3 is excluded and maybe they'd actually bother to build a console with the idea of emulating PS3 and put people on focusing on PS3 emulation.

 

But people seem perfectly happy with shitty content services taking the place of backwards compatibility. Own nothing. So it's consumer's fault we get fuck all.

[Jelly Soup]

5 hours ago, Stevieboy said:

 

Would a PS5 be capable of running it though?

 

This is speculation on my part, but I'd imagine so. The emulator itself, as Elvick put it, has room for improvement. Even as is, it's pretty simplistic and put together with a relatively low amount of knowledge of the more mysterious aspects of the PS3. It's an emulator in only a technical sense as it's not really fully emulating the PS3 so much as providing a custom way to run PS3 content. As is, a PS4/5 could run it as an app with little difficulty, likely doing it better with the actual hardware made for it right there. If Sony doesn't look into this themselves, I imagine we'll find out what well it would have worked once modders bother with the PS5 or the dev kits for same become more common on the secondary market.

 

2 hours ago, Elvick_ said:

[long post, gonna snip]

 

Overall agree on the pressing for PS1/2. I can't speak for anyone else, but my ultimate want isn't necessarily b/c but full network access. There is literally no reason to jury rig each new system into the PSN when the limitations can provably be overcome. At some point a judgement call will be needed on how long is too long to fix the whole network to make that possible. Take a lesson from WoW, do the hard, complicated work now, not six systems down the road when it'll be nearly impossible.

 

But it's also like your further point. This is all about forcing that all digital future. All the money of physical games, all the control over the userbase, you own pretty much nothing so behave.

[pinkrobot_pb]

I do not think the emulator for PC should be taken as a benchmark for Sony when talking about full backwards compatibility on a PS5 or PS6. Sony should still have all the source code and technical details about their own system readily available. I really hope their own appraoch would be different than some guys on the internet (even though those can sometimes deliver stellar results).

 

The Cell processor was notoriously cumbersome to develop for as a game programmer, because there was a lot of manual managing of memory and CPU tasks involved. Adjusting your existing game code from PC or another platform was pretty much the same as a complete rewrite. Cutting corners would lead to either bad performance (because of mostly idle SPE's) or bugs that could be incredibly hard to debug. No wonder that studios that got the best out of the system were the ones coding games from the ground up for the PS3 specifically. All that labour has already been done though, we have the games.

 

Give a small group of talented PS5 programmers half a year with all the information that is available and I truly believe you could start seeing great results. But those people are (and probably should be) working on the PS5 or even the PS6 already. Sony will not spend that time, talent and money to give us PS3 backwards compatilbity, just so we can play games we mostly already own.

 

So yeah, I take this new Classic Games Preservation Society or whatever with a grain of salt. Whenever Sony thinks it can get away with half assing anything, they absolutely will.

[Jelly Soup]

Oh, yeah, I'm not claiming that the existence of a workable out of system substitute is the end all be all for the entire issue. More that it's a kind of case study for the concept and then some musing on my part. On the point about applying work so we can play games we already own, I'd argue that the fabled PS3 bc will be a feature in the far future, PS6 or 7 maybe, simply because the playerbased will have changed significantly by then. Likely many of us here will move on to other things or cut way back. But there will also be new generations of players who are new to the classic stuff and would likely want their own accounts. In that situation I can see Sony channeling Nintendo for a couple overpriced repacks of whatever is on hand.

[Rebourne07]

Everyone talking about it not being worth it...I think having millions of people bump up to the higher tier in monthly subscription fees more than warrants the cost of upgrading backwards compatibility. They'll never give us disc backwards compatibility, it'll be locked behind the subscription which will then make it very much worth their while financially to make it as enticing an experience as they can. I don't mind paying for backwards compatibility if it comes with perks like graphics enhancements, trophy support and all on one system and I think there's millions more like me out there. For every million of us that's $60 million a year...every year in perpetuity...with the upgrade from Essential to Premium. 

Edited April 29, 2022 by Rebourne07

[AJ_Radio]

1 hour ago, Rebourne07 said:

Everyone talking about it not being worth it...I think having millions of people bump up to the higher tier in monthly subscription fees more than warrants the cost of upgrading backwards compatibility. They'll never give us disc backwards compatibility, it'll be locked behind the subscription which will then make it very much worth their while financially to make it as enticing an experience as they can. I don't mind paying for backwards compatibility if it comes with perks like graphics enhancements, trophy support and all on one system and I think there's millions more like me out there. For every million of us that's $60 million a year...every year in perpetuity...with the upgrade from Essential to Premium. 

 

This is obvious.... because they can make a lot more money keeping it this way instead of having us use our old PS3 games that we've had sitting around for the past decade. Then there's the countless gamers out there who unquestionably accept most anything these massive corporations give them.

 

I've bitched countless times about the Nintendo Switch + Expansion Pack subscription deal on numerous gaming forums, and it just basically comes down to us being a vocal minority.

[Jelly Soup]

1 hour ago, Rebourne07 said:

Everyone talking about it not being worth it...I think having millions of people bump up to the higher tier in monthly subscription fees more than warrants the cost of upgrading backwards compatibility.

 

But does it? That's been the question since the end of the PS3. Is it actually worth the effort to make substantial bc releases beyond the PSOne Classics series? I've pointed to the existence of the emulator and fan made achievements as examples of it being possible beyond what we see, but that doesn't mean full network support for the whole shebang won't be a massive undertaking. And not a cheap one either. Is it actually worth the money to do that or take the WoW model and keep finding ways to build new guns on the Yamato? Sure, people around here are more likely than your average gaming community to jump onto the new thing just for the sake of the new thing. Hell, I'm planning on buying a year at the highest tier just to see what it's like. But AJ has the right of it: We're a vocal minority.

[Jeanolt]

1 hour ago, Rebourne07 said:

Everyone talking about it not being worth it...I think having millions of people bump up to the higher tier in monthly subscription fees more than warrants the cost of upgrading backwards compatibility. They'll never give us disc backwards compatibility, it'll be locked behind the subscription which will then make it very much worth their while financially to make it as enticing an experience as they can. I don't mind paying for backwards compatibility if it comes with perks like graphics enhancements, trophy support and all on one system and I think there's millions more like me out there. For every million of us that's $60 million a year...every year in perpetuity...with the upgrade from Essential to Premium. 

Yeah, is simple as that. Personally I don't care about backwards compatibility because sadly I never owned many original PSX-PS2 games, and I just have a few PSP games which wouldn´t even fit in the console. I hope they make it a reality eventually, but a lot of people just don't have the old games anymore/never had them, and is better to wait for the service.

The alternative for them is buying old games with a random chance of them being broken or being worth 80$.

Edited April 30, 2022 by Jeanoltt

[TheRetroManiac]

Here is what I found from the guy who was hired.

 

 

[DaivRules]

Looks like this role/team has absolutely nothing to do with emulation:

 

https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/playstation-engineer-details-work-of-sonys-new-preservation-team-3214759

 

Seems like a team that should have been doing such a thing since the early PS1 days…

 

 

 

 

[darkalphar]

If I recall right, from reading an article about PS3 emulation issues some time ago, the issue was that large portion of its performance were devoted to its CELL processors to the point that it its other parts of PS3 (such as its CPU) suffered. As result developers had to resort to a workaround of shuffling data between CPU and memory several times during different sages of processing before finally displaying the output.

 

This is more or less the reason why PS3 is hard to emulate; even if PS5 has enough power to do the emulation, there's still a lot of repeated shuffling around of data before the final output so there's so many chances of something going wrong.

Edited April 30, 2022 by darkalphar
Corrected some spelling errors & typos

[AJ_Radio]

3 hours ago, darkalphar said:

If I recall right, from reading an article about PS3 emulation issues some time ago, the issue was that large portion of its performance were devoted to its CELL processors to the point that it its other parts of PS3 (such as its CPU) suffered. As result developers had to resort to a workaround of shuffling data between CPU and memory several times during different sages of processing before finally displaying the output.

 

This is more or less the reason why PS3 is hard to emulate; even if PS5 has enough power to do the emulation, there's still a lot of repeated shuffling around of data before the final output so there's so many chances of something going wrong.

 

The bigger picture is we're heading towards a future where game preservation is essentially subscription based services that you have to pay for. I am against this for several reasons, the most notable reason being you do not own anything on the subscription service.

 

Digital only games are already glorified rentals, and while subscription based services can often be convenient, the library of games, movies, tv shows or whatever can be very volatile. As a long time Netflix user I have seen many movies and shows suddenly get taken off and delisted, which screws not only people like myself but future movie goers as well.

[Ich1994-1994]

Just give me a ps3 emulator. I would pay 5€ a month for that. And you could probably make me pay 10 even tho I would feel ripped off^^

[DaivRules]

1 hour ago, AJ_Radio said:

The bigger picture is we're heading towards a future where game preservation is essentially subscription based services that you have to pay for.

No, clearly you didn’t read the information posted in the thread about game preservation. Game Preservation the handling of all developmental assets related to a game in a methodical functional storage state so they can be used later by the company in the far future, rather than just saving a singular binary file. 
In one sense, yeah, you have to pay for it since part of the cost you pay to the company will have to cover the cost of the storage mediums and the payroll required, but it has nothing to do with a service end users need to pay for to get access to. 
 

 

[DaivRules]

5 hours ago, darkalphar said:

If I recall right, from reading an article about PS3 emulation issues some time ago, the issue was that large portion of its performance were devoted to its CELL processors to the point that it its other parts of PS3 (such as its CPU) suffered. As result developers had to resort to a workaround of shuffling data between CPU and memory several times during different sages of processing before finally displaying the output.

 

This is more or less the reason why PS3 is hard to emulate; even if PS5 has enough power to do the emulation, there's still a lot of repeated shuffling around of data before the final output so there's so many chances of something going wrong.

This article I’m sure very few will read, and even less will try to understand helps break down why there literally isn’t anything like the architecture of the PS3 out there and the Xbox 360 people often compare it to is never a legitimate comparison: https://www.gtplanet.net/playstation-3-cell-more-powerful-modern-chips/

 

[Jeanolt]

15 hours ago, AJ_Radio said:

 

The bigger picture is we're heading towards a future where game preservation is essentially subscription based services that you have to pay for. I am against this for several reasons, the most notable reason being you do not own anything on the subscription service.

 

Digital only games are already glorified rentals, and while subscription based services can often be convenient, the library of games, movies, tv shows or whatever can be very volatile. As a long time Netflix user I have seen many movies and shows suddenly get taken off and delisted, which screws not only people like myself but future movie goers as well.

I think Sony still didn't confirm if we'll be able to buy the games separately. That's the case in Xbox, and I hope they do the same here. We should wait until we know if the games are locked into the subscription or not.

[AJ_Radio]

On 4/30/2022 at 1:10 AM, DaivRules said:

No, clearly you didn’t read the information posted in the thread about game preservation. Game Preservation the handling of all developmental assets related to a game in a methodical functional storage state so they can be used later by the company in the far future, rather than just saving a singular binary file. 
In one sense, yeah, you have to pay for it since part of the cost you pay to the company will have to cover the cost of the storage mediums and the payroll required, but it has nothing to do with a service end users need to pay for to get access to. 
 

 

 

There's a lot more going into this than what I've explained in my previous post. We live in an era where it's easier than ever to simply collect thousands of digital only titles and be subscribed to multiple streaming services. Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu included, even though they have nothing to do with gaming.

 

I don't buy into much of what Sony is currently doing and I'm currently being cautious until I see more of this game preservation team. At the end of the day, it's all about money and nothing else.

 

On 4/30/2022 at 2:47 PM, Jeanoltt said:

I think Sony still didn't confirm if we'll be able to buy the games separately. That's the case in Xbox, and I hope they do the same here. We should wait until we know if the games are locked into the subscription or not.

 

I don't know enough to explain in more detail. But the state of physical media that is now dying and decaying in place of digital only media already has me a bit worried.