In early February, Sony Interactive Entertainment filed a new patent that caused quite a stir in the gaming community. The document describes an innovative way to simulate old hardware on modern systems and directly addresses one of the biggest long-standing problems of the PlayStation ecosystem: full, local backwards compatibility, including PS1, PS2 and especially PS3 games.
The biggest hurdle so far has been the PS3, due to the specific Cell architecture that relied on a combination of the main PPE core and multiple SPE sub-cores. That construction has proven to be extremely difficult for software emulation, even on modern PCs, where problems with stability and performance errors are common.
Patent reveals how PS6 could solve PlayStation’s biggest problem
Currently, users of PS5 consoles can only play a limited number of PS3 titles and only through a PS Plus subscription, using cloud streaming. Such an approach carries a number of trade-offs, including high requirements for a stable Internet connection, control delay, and image compression.
A new Sony patent, however, describes a so-called hybrid emulation system. The idea is that the future hardware, which is assumed to be the PlayStation 6, uses its own resources to precisely simulate the behavior of the Cell processor at a low-level level. The system would intelligently distribute tasks and solve the problem of time synchronization between different emulation units, which would enable local launch of PS3 games without relying on the cloud.
This direction of development is fully in line with the philosophy of the chief architect of the PlayStation platform, Mark Cernya, who has been advocating for a painless transition between generations for years. If the patent turns into a real product, the PS6 could become a digital archive of sorts, bringing together three decades of PlayStation history on one console.
For Sony, this would also mean a strong strengthening of the value of the PS Plus service, because the local launch of games would bring better image quality and completely eliminate the delay compared to existing streaming solutions. It would also be a direct response to Microsoft’s long-standing advantage in compatibility with older devices.
While the patent itself doesn’t guarantee a final implementation, it clearly shows where Sony is thinking. It remains to be seen whether the full compatibility of all generations will really become one of the key assets of the PS6 console or will remain just an ambitious idea on paper.