The PS2’s Backwards Compatibility from the Engineer Who Built It

Post by zoklet-enjoyer » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 12:43 AM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #40

highwaylights wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bruce Willis was a ghost THE ENTIRE TIME In both cases, I think enough time has passed :-)

I agree, FF7 was a long long time ago, but the warnings are still nice and appreciated. New people are born, grow up, and get introduced to old things after all. Plus, some gamers are always playing a decade or two behind since prices become dirt cheap, games get re-released in more complete forms without a need for buying a bunch of DLC to access the parts they paywalled off, and most of the bugs and crashes will be…

Post by beaned » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 1:07 AM UTC

beaned wrote: post #32

jdwithit wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wild how often these "this was my first development job of any kind" stories crop up in the gaming industry. This seems like a deeply technical project requiring expertise in some very niche areas. Yet Sony trusted this fresh grad with zero experience to knock out one of their marquee features essentially on his own... and it worked??

I don't have any evidence for this but I feel like things used to work more this way in the future. Now we send everything to experts, people with licenses and degrees and years of experience. And I mean it works, but we pay in terms of lost creativity, and create fewer opportunities for younger and lesser experienced people to become experienced themselves.

Post by qbasic_forever » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 1:26 AM UTC

kitsunesoba wrote: post #28

RajT88 wrote: post #14

In my humble opinion, the PS2 is the best retro console for tinkering. So many of them were sold, they can be had cheaply, lots of aftermarket stuff for them (HDD/Network adapter), Crazy huge library of weird and interesting titles, vibrantly active homebrew community. And of course, the built-in backwards compatibility. Several interesting hardware revisions to play with as well (although the "fat" ones are the most…

I would agree, which is why a PS2 is on my list of consoles to acquire at some point, but it does have one significant nit: there is easily available no digital video output mods for them, which makes getting a decent picture out of them a challenge unless you already have a suitable CRT to pair with it.

Post by monocasa » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 1:56 AM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #15

> All an emulator is doing is changing the shape and flow of those commands. Maybe if you're SIMH and you're emulating an old CPU that was connected asynchronously to like RS232 peripherals. But I think this statement understates the complexity of emulating something like a console. Emulating a console or home computer, or even something like an old console's GPU, is HARD because you have to do these translations in…

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 01, 2023, 3:30 AM UTC

beaned wrote: post #32

jdwithit wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wild how often these "this was my first development job of any kind" stories crop up in the gaming industry. This seems like a deeply technical project requiring expertise in some very niche areas. Yet Sony trusted this fresh grad with zero experience to knock out one of their marquee features essentially on his own... and it worked??

I don't have any evidence for this but I feel like things used to work more this way in the future. Now we send everything to experts, people with licenses and degrees and years of experience. And I mean it works, but we pay in terms of lost creativity, and create fewer opportunities for younger and lesser experienced people to become experienced themselves.