And over time with hardware revisions it put more and more of the emulator functions and less from real hardware. So even at initial launch it was at least partially using emulation for playstation games. The PS2 ultimately wasn’t 100 percent backwards compatible with the PS1 back catalog, but it nevertheless supported nearly all of it. In the end, there were a handful of games that just wouldn’t run properly, resulting in us compiling a public blacklist of PS1 games that players wouldn’t be able to play on the system.Īfter the Japanese hardware launch came the ones in North America and Europe, whose respective PS1 games the emulator naturally also supported. Work on the PS1 emulator was mostly completed around New Year’s, if I’m not mistaken. The PlayStation 2 was eventually released in Japan on March 4, 2000. There was only one problem: sometimes it froze in emulation.Īs for why we simply couldn’t start playing the morning of the announcement, that was because there was a chance the emulator itself wouldn’t load and there wouldn’t be enough time to fix it right then and there. For that reason, it was chosen as the game to show off the PS2’s backwards compatibility. A number of PS1 games were now able to run on it, with Crash Bandicoot: Warped being the best of the bunch. Several months had passed since Ridge Racer first booted up and progress on the GPU emulator had come a long way. My role was to perform a live demonstration of the console’s backwards compatibility with the PS1 once the functionality was announced during the presentation. Even if the only thing that was actually being emulated was the GPU, that’s when I knew it was going to be possible to achieve PS1 backwards compatibility on the PS2 with that level of software emulation.Įarly in the morning on March 2, 1999, I was standing behind the stage curtains at the Tokyo International Forum, where the PlayStation 2 was going to be officially unveiled to the world later that day at the PlayStation Meeting 1999. Still, I was just pleased to see the game running at all. ![]() ![]() That being said, the initial results were hardly perfect, to put it very, very kindly. The first PS1 game that booted up in the PS2’s emulator was Ridge Racer. After that, I set about implementing missing functions as I initially tried to focus on reprogramming the PS1’s GPU commands. ![]() My first order of business was to therefore get up to speed on the GPU specifications for both the PS1 and PS2. Someone else was already supposed to be taking care of that and when I asked what was going on, I was told that they were quitting the company and that it was on me to pick up where they left off, no ifs, ands, or butsīy the time that I inherited the GPU emulation work, the previous person in charge had thankfully already laid down a basic framework, so I didn’t have to start completely from scratch. Specifically, I was put in charge of emulating the PS1’s graphics processor, a request that utterly baffled me. My next assignment, however, came as a huge surprise. As it turned out, the PS1’s sound chip was going to be included as part of the PS2’s internals after all, meaning that all of our work was thrown out of the window. I don’t remember quite how long we’d been working, but one day, everything was upended unceremoniously. A senior member of the team who worked specifically in sound engineering tackled the emulation work on the DSP side, while I focused my attention on the core. ![]() The PS2’s sound chip is structured into two parts: the core and the digital signal processor. Having been involved with the software engineering side of things up until that point, it was up to me to write the emulator for the PS1’s SPU, or its sound hardware. The catch, however, was that none of the other hardware from the PS1 was, at that point, going to be included, meaning that the rest of it would have to be emulated with software. When this decision to make the PS2 backwards compatible with PS1 games had been made, the plan was already for the PS2 to reuse the main processor on the PS1 as an input/output processor for the new hardware. I Developed the PS1 Backwards Compatibility Emulator for Sony Computer Entertainment
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