The PS2’s Backwards Compatibility from the Engineer Who Built It
freelansations.medium.com
freelansations.medium.com
Sadly, that is the most technical part of the essay. The rest of it is just anecdotes. They talk briefly about a Crash Bandicoot freezing issue just before launch, which they got around by trying to play the game repeatedly: "All I could figure out was that as long as Crash kept moving, the game remained stable for whatever reason."
I still want to know what was wrong with Crash Bandicoot.
they have their own state of the art game engine with cutting edge features
It's been known that ND haven't been doing anything with GOOL or GOAL since the end of the Jak & Daxter era, around the time that Andy Gavin left. But the programmers there were still using Racket to generate data, scripts, and glue code for their new engine well into the era of TLOU. My conspiracy theory regarding TLOU's third remaster/rerelease is that it happened in significant part because they wanted to get rid of the Racket bits so that they could focus on hiring average developers from a large talent pool to execute on Druckmann's auteur-wannabe vision. Retconning Ellie to not look like Elliot Page and promotion for the HBO series were also factors, but I think the focus at ND has changed to becoming Yet Another Generic Game Studio, and managing the TLOU IP.
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 moddable).
Xemu has had a lot of work put into it recently though, and is a lot further along.
I've used component cable as well as one of those HDMI adapters which are powered off USB - and it's not that much different with my CRT. Maybe it makes more of a difference with an LCD.
As far as modding goes, keep an eye out for one of a handful of games with exploits like one of the 007 James Bond games. There's a software mod exploit you can run that turns a memory card into a mod device effectively, no hardware changes necessary. It's a little fiddly but works great and you just do it once and are good to go playing burned backups, homebrew, etc.
If you have a HDD adapter you can just image it and chunk it right in with no FreeMcBoot.
Did You Know Gaming?: https://www.youtube.com/@DYKGaming/videos Shmuplations: https://shmuplations.com/
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 a bug-for-bug compatible way, with strict timing constraints -- for the system's many components -- and you have to take into account the raster nature of CRT displays, which allowed for changing the display in significant ways between frames or scanlines.
There's a reason why emulation is these days usually only undertaken by some of the strangest most terminally online people, and it can take even them decades to get the details right. Of course, this engineer worked at Sony and probably had the benefit of being able to talk to the developers of the graphics chip he was emulating, but that's still a daunting task.
Not only that, but you need to catch the way the hardware is accessed on the emulated console by generating a fault or trap, then rearrange everything for the actual hardware, and then pass control back to the emulated code on a processor that had, IIRC, no provision for hardware assisted virtualization.
> the raster nature of CRT displays, which allowed for changing the display in significant ways between frames or scanlines
In case anyone would like to know more, this is a really good explanation of these concepts:
> There's a reason why emulation is these days usually only undertaken by some of the strangest most terminally online people
They could be perfectly normal people for all we know... A few days ago I saw a comment here from someone who worked with an emulator developer. Only revealed that fact to him after 4 years working together.
Also, as part of backward compatibility the PS2 just has a miniature PS1 in it, so the hardware is fundamentally able to do the old things.
In both cases, I think enough time has passed :-)
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 patched out.
The team made comments around making something sufficiently different that it wouldn't be seen as trying to replace the original, but that could sit alongside it as a retelling of the story. I think they absolutely nailed it in this regard and if anything, finishing FF7R has me wanting to play through the original all over again.
Even at that, I wouldn't expect the spoiler we're talking about from the article to happen the same way in Rebirth, or possibly even at all. It's too good of an opportunity to surprise people that I think they take a dramatically different direction (my guess would be on the same story element happening featuring another major character, but this seems like lazy writing).
Very excited for the next entry regardless.
Speaking of: I just discovered that newly manufactured keyboards with PS/2 keyboard interfaces are now an oddity. I should have bought some "gaming keyboards" with PS/2 interfaces five years ago.