PS2 Hardware Inside PS3?

Now this is interesting. It appears the PS3 will actually have the PS2 hardware inside of it. This partially explains the high cost.

According to the July issue of Japan's Ultra One magazine (which covers technology), backwards compatibility on the PlayStation 3 will be handled through actual PS2 hardware included in the box.

The box will supposedly include the core PlayStation 2 chipset, including the Emotion Engine and Graphics Synthesizer. These are combined into one chip in the slimmed down PS2 model, so this combined chip would presumably be the one included. According to the story this will only be a stopgap solution, until Sony can finish development on a software emulator that would do essentially the same thing.

Naturally, this would drive up already-high development costs quite a bit, but would insure near-100% compatibility with all PS2 games. On the bad side, it would also mean there would be virtually no chance of PS2 games being enhanced on the PS3 in any way. If it was handled all in software, there would likely be some inconsistencies in the emulation (similar to the "quriks" found when running Xbox games on the Xbox 360), but there would be no extra development costs involved.

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