Report from Japan suggests that a mini PS2 will be included in every PS3. A surprising report has emerged from Japan's Ultra One monthly technology magazine. The magazine's July issue reports that Sony will be achieving backwards compatibility on the PlayStation 3 not through software emulation, as previously announced, but through physical hardware.
The magazine states that the PS3 hardware, in its current form, includes the core PlayStation 2 chipset. This presumably means that initial PS3 units will include the single Emotion Engine (the PS2 CPU) and Graphic Synthesizer (the PS2 graphics chip) combo chip that powers the slim model PS2.
Of course, including the extra hardware drives up costs. The magazine adds that Sony plans on removing the PS2 chipset from future revisions of the PS3 hardware once it has finished development of a proper software-based PS2 emulator. Such a removal would help bring down costs for the system.
This is how you get the system to be Backwards Compatible. They did it with the ps2 by putting in parts of the ps1 into it. Microsoft didn't own the CPU and GPU for xbox 1 so they would have to go through the entire negotiation process with nvidia and intel to produce new smaller xbox 1 chips to put into the xbox 360, MS knew this would greatly increse the cost of the xbox 360 and was not feasible charging xbox 360 owners to have xbox 1 parts in it when only some people would actually use it. However Microsoft owns the IPs to the xbox 360 this time around so they put parts of the xbox 360 into the third xbox and through have full hardware backwards compatibility
Great... How much is the PS3 going to cost now??? The price keeps getting higher and higher...
no where in the article did it say the price was going up. it said that the development cost is going up, and please, do you honestly think that the people of sony didn't realize this was a possiblity when they gave the price no even a month ago. if anything, if they emulation software were to be finished before launch and able to be put into first generation ps3's then they probably would of dropped the price, so as to increase consumer support in the system, that is a basic strategy in marketing, and something i am sure has been talked about for many months and not just recently
I honestly didn't think this is how Sony made most of their games backward compatible for the ps1 and ps2. It's strange cause only the early PS3 adopters will have backward compatibility than? I guess so. It makes sense for the xbox 360 to stop making new games backward comp., but this move is quite strange if only a group of people will be able to use backward compatibility. I bet only the 600 dollar pack will have this, makes sense. Also because of the blu-ray in the 500 dollar one not having hdmi, when hdcp kicks in a couple years from now EVERY person with a 500 pack won't be able to play blu-ray movies. Just a random fact.
SWEET!!! Buy one piece of crap, get a second one FREE. You can't beat it!!! I don't REALLY mean that, I'm sure the PS3 will be great, but that is just crazy talk. Two for one???