PS3 God of War Collection USES PS2 Software Emulator!

Hey guys,

I don’t know if you remember but a couple months back there was news all over N4G that Sony had "patented" a way to emulate the PS2 using the Cell processor. This was a big deal because it was the first time that the PS2 could be emulated successfully without any hardware/chips like previously backward compatible PS3s.

Fast forward to this week: Sony has a megaton announcement. God of War I and II are going to be "remastered" and released this holiday season for $39.99. They will be running 1280x720p, 60 frames a second and with 2x anti-aliasing plus trophy support. At first glance this seems to indicate that the games are being "ported" (i.e. converted into PS3 format) especially because it supports trophies. Now follow my reasoning for a second; software emulation on PCs allows you to play games at much higher resolutions, framerates and even with additional filtering such as anti-aliasing than on the "native" system. Then one might ask, if it’s running on an emulator, then how the heck does it have PS3 trophy support? And I have a simple answer, how does the Sega Mega Collection released earlier this year support PS3 trophies even though it is also essentially running via Genesis/megadrive emulator? Same thing!!

Now if you look in the actual IGN interview, John High of SCEA says this:

We haven’t developed general purpose code that would now work for every PS2 title out there. Basically what we wanted to do was we wanted to remaster [the games], and we’ve done a lot of things to not only have it run on the PS3 but also make it look better, perform smoother and have a little bit extra functionality. Furthermore he even says: "Well, I don’t necessary agree with just the terminology "port" If you read more he says that at this point, there has been no new high resolution textures/upgrades to the game.

So it looks that Sony has a functional software emulator but it isn’t optimized to play EVERY PS2 game with no hitches. In this way, by releasing the God of War Collection, they optimized it to perform with these two titles and they are profiting off all their R&D that they spent to get PS2 software emulation on the PS3.

If you think about it, this is much more lucrative than just releasing this software emulator on the PSN store or as part of a firmware update. Because now you can actually "sell" this as a product and they will be able to do many more of these "remasters" in the future. If Sony tried to "sell" just the emulator there would be a big uproar by all the non B/C compatible PS3 owners plus they’d get negative publicity by all the anti-Sony sites like Kotaku. LOL!!

PLEASE PLEASE, I want comments telling me if you agree/disagree with my hypothesis. I am almost 100% certain this is what’s going on but I want your input too!!