Backward compatibility, a big deal, & technically difficult (Gaming)

by dogcow , Hiding from Bob, in the vent core., Wednesday, June 17, 2015, 14:08 (3451 days ago) @ Cody Miller

A few thoughts:
Backward compatibility is a big deal. I hope this causes Sony to scrap Playstation Now or at least reinvent it.

Both systems were dicks about backwards compatibility, and I think it hurt them both. I really think PS2 was only so successful because it was a direct upgrade to PS1 without requiring a brand new game library. Same for Xbox 360 upgrading original Xbox. I don't understand both companies scrapping it with the new systems.

it was scrapped because it'd be too damn expensive, and emulation can't keep up! We are just barely getting PS2 emulation working, and you think Sony could have a PS3 emulator run on a PS4?! Emulation of 8 way parallel processing is beyond impossible right now at playable speeds.

Backward compatibility is a big deal, but it is often technically infeasible. I was shocked to find that the 360 was doing it through emulation. Emulation has so much overhead that the hardware must make a huge leap forward. The alternative to emulation is recompiling (read PORTING) the game to native code on the new hardware. I wonder how the XBone will be doing it, JIT emulation or porting the specific games? I'd be surprised if the XBone had the horsepower for emulation, but then great leaps have been made in emulation technology over the past 10-15 years, so maybe.