PlayStation Now will stream PlayStation 3 games to PlayStation 4, but this is just one facet of the backwards compatibility that Sony wants to offer on its latest console as reports indicate that PS4 owners will be able to play games developed for previous versions of the consoles including PS1 and PS2.
According to a new report on Digital Foundry Sony is going to adopt an emulation based conventional route when it comes to PS1 and PS2 titles on PlayStation 4 with the possibility of HD visual enhancements.
Sony phased out hardware emulation after the early version of PlayStation 3 and PS Vita, which was used to play PS1, PS2 and PSP games; however, the company has been actively working on bringing it back for PlayStation 4 with native support for HD resolutions offering distinct visual advantage over the current PS1/PS2 upscaling.
The primary advantage of this would be that users won’t have to suffer from ‘potential’ downsides of PlayStation Now including input lag and lack of sufficient bandwidth. Having said that, anything that runs on PS3 can also run on the PlayStation Now and this brings us to the theoretical possibility of running PS1, PS2 and PSP titles on the streaming service.
However, Sony seems to brewing different ideas and wants to run PS1/PS2 titles through emulation with support for HD resolution rather than “gameplay over IP” cloud service.
