JP
Sony stopped making new PlayStation 2s in 2012, and in a few days the last vestige of support will end: https://www.usgamer.net/articles/ps2-is-finally-dead-18-years-after-release
Given that it's the best selling console of all time and its catalog is extremely significant, it deserves a better preservation effort than it's gotten. I wish PCSX2 were as far along and robust as Dolphin. I wish Sony had bothered with a 100% software back-compat solution for PS3/PS4, and that people in the industry hadn't been so dismissive of that.
PS2 is Finally Dead, 18 Years After Release

Goodnight, sweet prince.

Sep 3, 2018 at 3:05pmWeb
Show threadJPSep 3, 2018
The dismissal of platform-level back compat (ie put a PS2 disc into your PS3/PS4 and it Just Works) always leaned hard on murky platform holder anecdata like "people request this more often than they actually use and value it". And it's like, well you never really offered it for reals so you have no idea what the real demand was.
Show threadJPSep 3, 2018
But the real reason is that they make no measurable amount of money off this form of back compat, whereas they can make a bit of money off Virtual Console style repacks of the best sellers, where licensing allows. And that's how the capitalism cookie crumbles but a) I wish they'd just say that, and b) it's a shitty but sadly very normalized stance for a company that has managed to sequester a very significant slice of the history of an artistic medium on their now-abandoned proprietary platform.
Show threadDex 🔞 - Sep 3, 2018

@jplebreton The thing for me is that even these paid re-releases have plenty of emulation glitches that unofficial emulations don't have. Never fixed, never updated, give us $15 on top of what you paid for the original discs back in the day.

The first wave of Xbone backwards compat games were rough - but then MS went back and fixed them? It's still a smaller chunk of the library than I'd like (especially for OG Xbox), but a decent chunk of my 360 games will work with their original media.

Show threadLuci RocksSep 3, 2018
is PS2 emulation a hard enough problem to cut sony some slack here? and I don’t really mean sony the corporation but- yknow- the actual people that would have to build shit to make those features work.
Show threadLuci RocksSep 3, 2018
I recall recently reading that the people tasked with porting ff7 to windows were given literally nothung other than the PSX disc data. all the source files and source assets are all gone. same thing happened with okami. these people don’t seem all that organised
Show threadSpindley Q FrogSep 3, 2018
@zensaiyuki @jplebreton given what happened with PS2 back compat in the PS3 - PS3 launched with full hardware backwards compatibility that ran PS2 games better than PS2s did, then quickly underwent a hardware revision that removed that functionality but provided some software backwards compatibility, then underwent another hardware revision that removed even that - nooooope.
Show threadSpindley Q FrogSep 3, 2018
@zensaiyuki @jplebreton still angry I bought a PS3 at retail without realizing all PS2 backwards compatibility had been removed a couple weeks earlier
also still angry that my PS3 has a Linux partition that it will no longer boot, nor will it let me recover the space without completely wiping the system
Show threadLuci RocksSep 3, 2018
@SpindleyQ @jplebreton i suspect games that are owned only as downloads will be a dead loss down the road say 5-10 years from.now.
Show threadLuci RocksSep 3, 2018
@SpindleyQ @jplebreton a roommate had a ps3 which is why i went and bought a bunch of PS2 gamss. he was an asshole and never let me play them though. yeeeeears later (last year) i found a ps2 on a footpath and finally had a crack at the copy of kingdom gearts I bought, for about 10 minutes until i needed a memory card.
Show threadLuci RocksSep 3, 2018
@SpindleyQ @jplebreton i found one at a pawn shop. it’s just nuts this ps2 still works. pretty sure it had been rained on. it was filthy
Show threadSpindley Q FrogSep 3, 2018
@zensaiyuki @jplebreton I have to hope that somebody's pirating it all, and their collections will surface in time. Somebody's got to have hard drives full of all of XBLIG, all of PS Mobile, swathes of 32-bit iOS games. I need to believe that. The alternative is too horrible.
Show threadLuci RocksSep 3, 2018
@SpindleyQ @jplebreton easy enough to hold a copy. quite another to crack an encryption where the crypto key to unlock it is held on a server that doesn’t exist anymore
Show threadben burbankSep 3, 2018

@jplebreton it's such a bummer because the launch PS3 systems had ps2 hardware in them in NA / JP (I still have one of each, with replaced bluray lasers after the originals wore out).

I think a big part of it has been being able to charge you again for the same old games since supporting any of the emulation BC has non-zero testing and work involved (albeit on microsoft's side, the games that they do support work with discs or digital downloads preserving your old purchases).

Show threadEliot LashSep 7, 2018
@jplebreton This is nonsense, I've used this feature on every single Nintendo system I've ever owned. Props to them for always making the effort. And I think it makes the system more attractive on release since you also have access to a huge back catalogue.