Squilookle said:
"Report: PS4 to get PARTIAL PS1/2 Backwards Compatibility"
Come on, call it like it is. If they say 'select titles,' don't hype it up as being anything better than, say, the lousy xbox 360 partial backwards compatibility effort.
It basically amounts to them porting a PS1 and PS2 emulator over to PS4. It's certainly got the horsepower to do it, but they aren't going to certify that absolutely every title ever made for the hardware will work, because there will always be that one title that did something using an obscure undocumented feature of the hardware that makes emulators cry.
Hell, there have been cases where that was the case with PC hardware -- for example the 8086 instruction set supported popping from the stack into the CS register. There's no good reason you would ever want to actually do that if you are sane and aren't trying to write some horrific piece of spaghetti code specifically intended to be difficult to trace, but it was supported. Every following x86 chip does not support that instruction. The first generation of x86 processors to support protected mode also supported switching on paging (one of the main reasons to use protected mode) without actually turning on protected mode, aka "real mode paging" (which was much faster than protected mode if the only protected mode feature you needed was paging), which was also disabled in the following generation of processors and any attempt to activate that will cause an error. You could write an x86 emulator that will always work for all possible software ever because of things like that, but you can certainly hit the vast majority.
CAPTCHA: i need a vacation. Yes, captcha, I do. I'm also going to PAX East, so I'm going to have one soon enough... =p