The hardware architecture on the PS2 and PS3 was so radically different, it effectively makes emulation impossible.
The change made in the PS4 and PS5 makes the transfer of those games relatively trivial, but attempting the replicate the now abandoned Core processor of the PS3 is the hold up there, as is the PS2 Emotion Engine.
The reason the PS3 was so expensive was including PS2 hardware to handle the backwards compatibility. They weren’t going to repeat that mistake with the 4 and 5.
Meanwhile, on the Xbox side, Microsoft never had that problem.
Software emulation is very much possible. There is software for x86 and even ARM processors that emulate PS1, PS2(doesn’t work great on ARM I many cases) and PS3 (x86 only currently)which work well enough. If Sony cared to they could develop their own software emulation layer to run on PS5 to run just about everything from the previous generation.
Also Microsoft had similar issues in hardware emulation because, while the original Xbox and the Xbox one were on x86, the 360 was a Power PC architecture similar in some ways to the PS3 which ran Power PC with other proprietary coprocessors. They had to develop a Power PC emulator in software to run 360 games on the Xbox one.
A first party solution can’t work “well enough”, it just has to work.
PS1 emulation at this point should be trivial, 2 and 3 is not. The first time someone puts a disc in and it doesn’t work would be worse for them than not having it at all.
I think the thing holding back PS1 emulation is that once they open that door, everyone will go “What about 2 and 3?”
PS1 emulation is a breeze, but with current hardware in the PS5, I think a PS2 emulator on the platform wouldn’t be too insane. But yeah, PS3 emulation? Not happening.
I think you’re wrong on the disc not working thing though. The original Xbox was only half supported for a long time.
I think the problem with emulating a PS1 is “don’t meet (play) your heroes”.
Most of us played PS1 on dinky little CRT screens before we got used to the graphical fidelity we have these days.
Playing PS1 games on your 65" OLED will probably hurt your eyes.
It’s one of those things that you want to do because of nostalgia, but isn’t really great when it comes to it.
Besides, at the end of the day Sony is selling every PS5 they make, just like they did with the PS4 and PS3.
Adding backwards compatibility doesn’t make any financial sense as long as it’s not a killer feature that shifts sales towards Microsoft then Sony has little insensitive to do it.
They much prefer you buy those new AAA titles or subscribe to PS+.
Playing PS1 games on your 65" OLED will probably hurt your eyes. It’s one of those things that you want to do because of nostalgia, but isn’t really great when it comes to it.
That really depends on the game and upscaling methods used. Duckstation for instance does a pretty amazing job of making most of those old games look good. Check out this video of Crash Bandicoot running at 4K for instance.
I actually go the opposite direction and add CRT/scanline filters, especially since a lot of sprite work back in the day was built to be viewed that way. Those games look much better on CRTs with scanlines than they do in crystal clear integer upscaling.
Honestly, I remember playing full 3D titles on friends’ PS1s back in the day and thinking they’d given me eye cancer, even with the fuzz of an old CRT TV working in their favor. I don’t think I would want to play them now without a boatload of emulator graphic enhancements to deal with all the wonky 3D projection and unfiltered low-res texture mess of OG PlayStation games.
Didn’t stop them putting out a HDMI Mini PSX. You get around that by cleaver pixel replication and filtering upressing, etc. The PS3 PS1 emulator actually had options for this.
I’m 22. I grew up playing my PS1 on with an upscaler on the 55 inch Vizio in the front room. I like the PS1 art style quite a bit and think that a good upscale and maybe a filter is all you need to make things look how I want.
Idk, I think it would make a difference in the Microsoft v Sony sales. Nintendo doing the N64 and NES eShop have been massively successful. Xbox doesn’t really have any killer apps, they’ve really just had Sony beaten on software features the past two generations. Sony implementing the software features that Nintendo and Microsoft offer would make a decent difference.
Plus, imagine how well a “play your childhood discs on your xplaytendo switchtion” would work in an ad campaign. Getting people to pull out their childhood game collection would make for a great viral campaign for gamers as well.
Idk, the thing about the internet that I don’t think older people have realized is that it creates an even larger freeze in culture than ever before. If you started gaming in the 90s, you likely heard about older games via word of mouth and got your games at a physical store. There were no minor celebrities that would turn a cult classic into an actual classic. Nowadays? Old media is fully capable of wiping out new media in the right circumstances. Songs like “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac and some Pink Floyd (if I remember correctly) have taken #1 Billboard spots in the past 2-3 years. LSD Dream Emulator went from a game nobody played to a PlayStation classic because of some YouTube videos. We’re in an age where there is an extremely high demand for old media and no way to access most of it without piracy. There is a TON of money to be made by charging money for emulation and moving things to new consoles.
Mark my words, Skyrim will come out on the next generation Xbox, because Bethesda understands that accessibility is good enough to charge for.
I’m 36, not feeling the nostalgia, but then again I was always a PC gamer and never really had to struggle with the lack of support for old games.
I’ve played old games on newer hardware all the time over the years.
The most common realization is that the games were simpler and looked worse than you remembered.
Games also hold up better on PC, PS1 graphics was severely limited, and PS2 was a bit better, sure, but PC graphics were ahead of consoles.
PS3 and Xbox360 finally got to a level where the PC vs. console graphics playing-field seemed more even, and since then console graphics have been properly good in terms of value for money.
I paid more for my 3070Ti than my Series X, but I can’t really tell the difference without spending a lot of time optimizing the settings (or maybe I just need to break out other titles?).
The huge difference is that I can play any of the games I’ve bought over the years, plus most of the ones I acquired in my teenage years - if I wanted to.
Yet - what do I play? Surprise surprise - it’s not the games of yesteryear.
Obviously I’m just one data point, but considering how many gamers I surround myself with and I can’t recall when any of them wanted to play games from the 90’s that weren’t readily available console classics from Nintendo or Sega I’m not convinced it would make a huge difference if the classic games were available.
Maybe they’d sell more consoles, but people just don’t want to pay AAA money for 25-30 year old games. And it’s the games that make them money, not the consoles.
Skyrim is a game that probably deserves to be mentioned along Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac.
But in general comparing games and music is not that simple. Music production and recording has had high fidelity for ages. But pick up a worn cassette and put in an old tape deck and you might feel a bit what playing those old games feel like.
Only if you dramatically lower your standards for what backwards compatibility means. PS3 emulators might be progressing, but they're far from the native hardware in actual functionality, especially with games that actually used the features of the hardware that made the PS3 a powerhouse.
Emulators can wave that away as "it is what it is". Sony advertising backwards compatibility couldn't.
We’re almost at that point. PS3 emulation on the Steam Deck is ALMOST there. Another generation of hardware improvements should push us over the edge. Then it would be up to Sony to decide “hey, we want to make money on the titles we can license and put back in an online store…”
PS2 games work almost flawlessly on my steam deck under emulation and the PS5 is more powerful than that, and Sony have access to the OG system engineers, software and hardware to work from, note they already had PS2 games working on the PS4. The PS3 is the tricky but people do have it working on PC so no reason Sony couldn’t. There’s no excuse not to have PS1, PSP or PSVita emulation games as they’re all easy
Time-limited consumables as buffs can be a huge annoyance. In a ton of games I just end up stacking them, waiting for an opportunity where I need them, but usually when I need them, I don’t have the time to stop and use them. I keep ending those kind of games with an inventory full of potions.
I really like minor stat boosting items instead. So rather than giving me an inventory full of potions, give me three or four slots for items that can have a huge range of different bonuses and penalties, and they are pretty minor, but they’re permanent. That way I get to craft a build instead of just being annoyed
I personally prefer SMB3 because the controls feel tighter, where SMW sometimes feels “floaty”. But it’s a subtle difference. SMW gives you way more content, but not all of it is as good or as well-designed as the levels from SMB3 (though again, the difference is subtle.)
Mario Sunshine’s level design was not as well structured, but it had a lot of really interesting content. SMB3, SMW, and Mario 64 are my top 3 Mario games, but I can’t decide the order.
Sunshine was rushed and it shows. I played it contemporaneously but never got terribly far.
I played it a couple years ago all the way through when I got my Steam Deck and it had a ton of rough edges. It was a bit of a struggle to get through.
Yeah, Xbox controllers are pretty much standard. Comfortable, not overpriced, great compatibility with everything, no fuss. Newer ones, from the past several years now, will have Nintendo-style d pads, now that the patent has expired, and connect via bluetooth for wireless play or with a USB C cable to save on batteries. Speaking of batteries, it uses AAs, which means that you can actually swap them when they get low, as opposed to PlayStation controllers where batteries don’t last long and they aren’t really exposed for you to access them. I’m not going to tell you Xbox controllers are the be-all, end-all, but there’s a high chance it’s all you need.
EDIT: Even though I use Xbox controllers all the time, I forgot that the newest Xbox pads actually have d pads that are even better than Nintendo’s design. They look funky, but for my money, it’s the best d pad out there.
I tried out Linux a few months back, and one of the things I could never get working was my Bluetooth Xbox controller. The controller would just blink and never connect to the Bluetooth. Any idea what needs to be done to get it working? I was kind of annoyed that it didn’t just work since it’s such a popular controller.
Not me, sorry. On desktop Linux, I’m always wired, and the bluetooth always just worked when I needed it on Bazzite or Steam Deck, connecting via the controller setup in the Steam menu, but maybe someone else here will know.
For what it’s worth, this wired alternative is almost identical to an xbox one controller except for the rumble motor, which is markedly lower quality. If that doesn’t bother you, it’s also less than half the price, and works out of the box in all distros I’ve tried.
As a veteran of gaming on Linux for several years, I have to admit I keep a small collection of various usb bluetooth dongles, because honestly, built-in bluetooth support still remains questionable and unreliable in many cases, at least for me and the systems I use it on. I don’t necessarily blame Linux as much as I blame the manufacturers of the chips and devices, but unfortunately we have to live with the chaos that their reverse-engineered-firmware-reliant devices create. Any cheapass bluetooth dongle is probably fine, the cheaper and more ubiquitous it is, the more likely it uses the same shitty chinese chip that all the others use and that a bunch of someones already hammered out drivers for, but honestly even with multiple different models and brands it still seems like a crapshoot which one feels like working properly at any given time, but usually one or the other will work and get things to connect, and it’s usually perfectly reliable once all the drivers have loaded and it’s all paired up and things start working. The struggle is real, though.
In Wasteland 2 there is a museum of pre-war artifacts. One item is an undetonated nuclear bomb. If you monkey around with it you can find a big red button. It is obviously a terrible idea to push the button. If you still decide to push it you get a special game over screen.
My response to OP was literally going to be: “don’t buy it, and try your best to focus on the literal thousands of other great games that are out there”
But seriously, try it out. It’s a great game. You can play free for about 6mo before hitting the free wall, but you’ll probably pay for PRO soon enough.
I like the devs because they don’t do auto-renewals.
so i’ll admit it’s not the genre i’m typically listening to or playing in, but it was fun. without getting technical because i’m not sure how to communicate this technically, i enjoyed the energy coming off the music. i got pumped up. i liked it.
old blues (think big mama thornton and lead belly), mountain goats and “similar” indieish bands, some easier jazz, those tend to be my casual listening. i’m currently working through the collection of LPs i inherited which has a lot of Boz Scaggs and some original Beatles pressings and stuff like that, got this great classical collection of Soviet classical composers another close friend and former coworker gave to us when she heard we got a record player that she got from her mom that her mom got from a Beach Boy she was friends with I’ve been asked not to name and it’s an amazing collection.
My NEED TO LISTEN TO pile is taller than my NEED TO READ pile it’s a little embarrassing.
For anyone else whose never heard of a playdate console before it appears the crank on the side is “used for gameplay in select titles” rather than, as I hoped, a way to power the device like those old timey radios.
Still looks great, good article and more power too them! (Tho not via crank)
Ahhh that’s annoying. The crank looks like it makes the whole unit much more awkward to hold, especially for larger hands. The fact that it’s just a control gimmick which doesn’t really add anything to classic Game Boy games makes it a hard pass for me.
The crank is the sole reason this thing exists. If you want an emulation handheld to play Gameboy games without a crank there are countless options out there.
It’s a tough sell then. I did a search in the article for the word crank and got a lot of matches but it was too long for me to read. I would have preferred some short video clips to demonstrate exactly how it works.
This article isn’t about the playdate, it’s an article about an emulation software someone wrote that runs on the playdates hardware, so you won’t get a detailed explanation about the playdate as a general device there.
The playdate is a novelty device that anyone can develop Minigames for which use the crank for their gameplay. It is several years old at this point. It’s also very expensive for what it is so if you’re not a fan of just having little novel devices with not much use there is no reason to buy one. It is indeed a tough sell for most people but they have their own demographic of enthusiasts.
I’m a little confused why you’d form a strong opinion on something you willfully refused to read. In fact, even my title for the article kinda gives it away. Or the screenshot.
The crank folds down into an extremely satisfying magnetic dock that it can sit in while not using it.
Also… These aren’t classic Gameboy games, they’re modern games made specifically for the device. The unique control mechanism is the niche, and it’s surprisingly fun to use. You just also CAN emulate Gameboy games on it. There’s people who have made e-readers for it too… Though… That’s where even i draw the line lol
Sounds like this isn’t your thing though, there are lots of Gameboy emulator powered handhelds if that’s all you’re looking for. If you want extremely unique gameplay by tons of small indie developers (including Lucas Pope of Papers Please), super easy to make games for (I’ve made 2 just for friends), really easy side loading, and something just fun to show people, it’s a super easy sell.
But in relation to my article, and their work on CrankBoy…you can watch how they added the crank to the fishing part of the original Link’s Awakening fishing section. This kind of thing is why I think Sodium and Stonerl are doing amazing work, because it’s so different!
Now I’m curious if one can pull that off with simple games if features like high refresh rate and wireless thrown off. Also, price. With that ‘Memory LCD’ of theirs, it costs $100 per unit as per their Twitter.
14 days standby clock, 8 hours active
That’s what PD team claims for 740 mAh battery, it is what cheap mp3 players now have\consume. If there is a space to optimize it further, we’d see even better numbers, but I’m not confident this crank or little solar panel on the surface (whole back panel?) could make it autonomous. Yet, the idea of a handheld that LOVES sunlight is tempting. And, also, the idea of games that are built around slow and infrequent refresh like those minigames on e-books.
Also, the security manager sold his shares right before making the public statement about banning Schlepp. Isn’t insider trading even more illegal than child slavery?
The entire plot is about getting this girl to a location, only to get there, kill everyone and leave again. They could have stayed at home and the result would have been the same.
Same with The Mandalorian, the ending in Boba Fett completely invalidated the entire show. But that isn’t a video game.
I mean you’re right, but it makes sense in context in both cases because the plot, or maybe better to say the driving motivation for action by the characters, isn’t the real story.
TLOU isn’t the story of two survivors trying to reach a goal- thats set dressing. It’s the story of a man who lost his daughter being given a chance to confront his grief and grow close with another young woman who would be the same age. The relationship growing, their mutual guilt and relief and joy in finding that familial connection in a dying world IS the story. And the climax isn’t Joel shooting 50 more people, it’s when he chooses her over the whole world. Even when thats obviously the wrong choice.
From a plot view, nothing has changed. What actually “happened” was entirely between Ellie and Joel. But lots of stories are like that. If you released a movie where a grieving man connected with his adopted, formerly abused or neglected, daughter- that could be a good movie and you wouldn’t say “nothing happened” because it would be honest and upfront with its stakes. But fewer people would play that as a game so they have to obfuscate their actual story with apocalypse and zombie trappings.
Didn’t play TLoU, but if you didn’t catch it from the start, the point of The Mandalorian was clearly always about Grogu becoming ‘the Mandalorian’. Just cause it didn’t go the way you expected doesn’t mean nothing happened.
I think this highlights the big problem with Op’s question: it’s not all about plot, character development can be as satisfying and as important even if the world objectively doesn’t change.
It lives rent free in my head. I’ll be going through my day and then suddenly… there it is. Like some brain worm that occasionally rears it’s head and reminds me to play Wind Waker
That guy’s sound effects always stood out to me for some reason. Like I don’t know why but they seemed oddly out of place for the game. Not in a bad way but in like a jarring way
As a 3D animator, I can confidently tell you we routinely act out the part and film ourselves for reference, usually under multiple angles and over multiple takes.
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