Why doesn't Sony's software package include a PS2 emulator

I understand that a PS3 emulator would cannibalize PS3 sales, not to mention overtax the hardware on most (all?) current Vaios. But what about a PS2 emulator issued by Sony itself as part of the proprietary Vaio software? Seems to be to be a great situation.

Obviously this should only be done on machines that have GPUs that could smoothly run PS2 games. What would that be, the F, Z, SA, and L?

Here's why I think it's a good idea:

(1) It creates interconnectedness between different Sony divisions (I think the Bravia-inspired styling of the 2011 Vaios is an attempt to do the same). It might get people interested in Playstation-exclusive gaming series, like God of War, Killzone, Metal Gear Solid, and they might then go out and buy a PS3 to play the most recent games.

(2) It gives Sony some cred with casual gamers, even if hardcore gamers with their Alienwares and Sagers might scoff.

(3) It's not going to cannibalize PS3 sales...the PS3 isn't backwards-compatible with PS2 games.

(4) Sony could get a bit more mileage selling otherwise-retired PS2 games for $10-15 a pop. Even if they only make $1 profit on each, that's $1 more than not selling the old games at all and just giving up on them.

(5) It would cost almost nothing to implement.

Am I wrong about this, or is it a good idea?

 

Sony would never do it... why? Well, here's what I think.

1. Piracy. If Sony were to release a PS2 emulator, you really would have no reason to buy an more PS2 games. Sure this is illegal, but you can't deny how EASY it is to get game ISOS, ROMS, and what not.

2. Emulation is not that simple. Although the PS2 is quite an old system now, that doesn't make it easy to emulate. Take the PS3... the PS3 systems with software emulation of PS2's were not even completely compatible with all PS2 games. I would imagine that developing an emulator for the PC might even be more complicated.

Oh and you're joking if you think any laptop could emulate a PS3 system. Perhaps this could happen on a very powerful desktop (albeit with a very complicated emulator), but not on a laptop.

Oh and btw, there is a PS2 emulator out there (not made by Sony, anyway). In fact, I think there may be a few. Even though the system is very old, the people coding the emulator are having a very difficult time and I'm pretty sure the emulator is not very compatible with many PS2 games. Like I said, emulation is NOT simple.

I'm going to stop talking about this emulator now because I'm not sure if I'm allowed to really talk about it. :/

 

But as RACiE said, it might not be that easy to do even if they wanted to. It's possible the architecture of the processor and other hardware bits make it difficult or near impossible to properly implement. It may possible take up a bit of drive space to implement an emulator (Microsoft's Xbox 1 emulator on the 360 takes up 8GB but Sony's implementation may be different).

If I recall correctly, the first PS3s have PS2 emulation. Later on when Sony stripped out PS2 emulation on the PS3 (for the PS3 slim and I think some later versions of the fat) they took out a physical PS2 chip. Actually the way I remember it is the first PS3 fat had full PS2 emulation. Later on when they revised the PS3 fat they took out the PS2 chip and resorted to software emulation like Microsoft. When the PS3 slim came out they removed PS2 integration all together. After looking at that time line, it would raise the question of why bother with PS2 integration at all? If the PS3 had it to begin with and it got taken out, why would Sony want to expand the emulation to their computers? The answer is they don't. For some reason we don't know, they have scrapped the idea all together. Possible because they'd spend more on marketing for it than they'd get in profits or something like that.

So although it may sound like a nice idea, I don't think it's going to happen (although you never said such either) but it is nice to dream about it.

 

Let's keep the discussion away from the third-party emulation, given the legal issues. Besides, I was mainly hoping to start a discussion about a potential marketing/consumer satisfaction thing for Sony, not just looking for a way to play PS2 games (I have a PS2 myself already).

As for computing power, I suspected it was impossible to have enough power to run PS3 emulation on a computer, but I wasn't sure. Thanks for clarifying But as for PS2, it's a decade-old system. I can't imagine that the quad-core i7 and the 540M of the F2 has less gusto than a decade-old game console...can it?

As for ability to make the emulator work, I had thought that the lack of backwards compatibility in the PS3 was more of a policy decision by Sony (not one that I would agree with), not an actual inability to make it work?

About piracy, I'm very anti-piracy, so I'm certainly not looking for a way to expedite it. But if you had to use the actual game disk in the optical drive, how would there be any more game piracy than nowadays? It might be more of a problem if Sony distributed ROMs of the games, but honestly, is Sony selling ANY new copies of God of War I or Shadow of the Colossus or Okami anymore?

Yeah, I wasn't expecting them to actually reveal it in January 2012. But you never know...for years people on internet forums were saying "why doesn't Ford just sell the Euro Focus in the States?" and there were always the arguments "it's not that simple," or "they'll never do it," but then lo and behold, come model year 2012, here it was. So there's always some chance But you're right, given the (bizarre) removal of PS2 emulation from the PS3, Sony likely wouldn't add PS2 emulation to Vaios.

 

Haha... well no. But that just goes to show that emulation is much more complicated than it seems.

Actually, I thought Sony got rid of this to save money and bring down the price of the insanely expensive launch PS3's. As xxGenericSNxx said, when they gradually reduced the PS2 emulations in the PS3, they also gradually took out the old PS2 components in it. (First the CPU, then the GPU.) I believe this also allowed them to make a slimmer redesign because they didn't need to put in the old PS2 hardware inside.

When you remove the PS2 hardware, you have to rely more on emulation. The models that only have the PS2 GPU rely on software emulation, so it is not totally compatible with all PS2 games. Clearly making this emulator was somewhat difficult because they couldn't get full compatibility.

On a computer, you aren't going to have any of the hardware from the PS2 either, making it even more difficult to develop a good emulator.

Ehhh... pirates usually manage to find a way around this stuff. I'm not really sure how it would work.

Well you're right... there is a chance, but unfortunately it's pretty slim. But don't get me wrong, I'd love to see this feature too and if any Vaio had this, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

 

It is never about power. Emulation is actually about the computer architecture and how similar it is to the system is it emulating.

Dark wizardry.

 

Microsoft actually doesn't have an emulator. They litterally recompiled all of their xbox1 stuff, one title at a time, for the xbox360 architecture. That's why there is typically a large update when you insert an old xbox1 game in (considering I don't recall xbox1 games having updates) - it's downloading a recompiled *.xbe for the new SPARC/ATi (Xenos/Xenon) architecture.

 

And it takes a ton of power to do that emulation. Significantly more power than the hardware it would run natively on.

 

well, that depends on either architecture, and how the emulation is being done. While I said what MS did isn't *pure* emulation, in a sense, they are replacing every x86/nVidia command with a SPARC/ATi command. While there are some performance issues from a nonoptimized transfer (case in point, the occasional framerate issue in Halo2 on the xbox360 - though you get higher res textures, too, I think)...

who am I kidding. The xbox360 is a triple core with SMT, clocked at 3.2GHz vs the 733Hz single core on the xbox, and it still cannot properly handle all xbox1 games flawlessly. Some of this may be due to addition CPU memory latency in the xbox360 design... though that's pure speculation on my part.

 

Not entirely. If that were the case, my desktop PC with a 955 AMD, XFX 6950 2GB, and 8GB RAM should outperform a PSP for PS1 emulation.. but it doesn't in some cases. The PSP has the software and similar architecture compared to my PC which has nothing similar to the PS1.

Even the European Pandora handheld outperforms my PC because it has a ARM CPU compared to my AMD 955 which a lot of older systems used and it perfect for emulation, even if it is only 600+ Mhz; the Pandora out-emulates my PC.

And on power: if a PSP can emulate PS1 games (almost at full speed), why can't it emulate SNES, genesis, and sometimes NES at full speed? Because of the architecture.

 

There is a recent article about console emulation at ARS:
Accuracy takes power: one man's 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator