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.

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.
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.
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
@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.
@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
@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.
@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.
@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
@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.
@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