I don't know if Sony has made an official statement on this yet, but does anyone know if PS1 and PS2 games be playable on PS4? Since PS1 classics are available on PSP, Vita and PS3, and PS2 classics are available on PS3, I would assume Sony will have some sort of emulator software that will run these games on PS4, right? It'd be amazing if they were all able to be emulated from the disc, because then I could take my old PS2 off the shelf and have room for new consoles.

I don't believe they've said anything. Stuff released as classics probably have a good chance at working and probably at least ps1 games in general. Emulation for all PS2 games is harder to say. I don't know how the PS2 classics stuff works on PS3, but the PS2 does have a weird enough architecture that it's not a trivial thing to emulate it, even with hardware like the PS4. It's probably not high on their priority list to make that work.

What I think they will try and do (and what I hope) is that they'll end up with as complete a library that they can reasonably put together of PS1, PS2 and PS3 games on Gaikai that you will stream.

@damodar: They build an emulator for the PS2 games.

I doubt this stuff will be there at launch, if at all. I see them doing monthly games in a rotation through Gaikai.... probably by 2015.

I think it's gonna be through Gaikai.

It seems like it would be cheaper and more accessible to offer them like they're doing right now. I bought final fantasy 7 on psn, for example, it'd be cool if that worked out of the box on ps4. It would be smart of them to offer ps1/2 classics as part of the instant game library at launch while there's not a lot of instant library titles they can offer. It'll be a good couple years before the ps4 has a catalog of games that can be thrown in as freebies.

Maybe?

While the streaming library is cool in theory, there are a lot of people whose internet connections range from slightly iffy to consistently atrocious. Streaming is solid when it comes to video, but unless they've created a system that's significantly more stable than onlive, I see controller latency, buffering and lossy video signal being a huge potential problem for a large portion of ps4 players. I think I have the fastest internet speeds comcast will offer me, and I still get issues streaming movies, and people that are stuck with frontier or some other low-end ISP's are going to be especially screwed.

It seems building some emulation software would be the easiest route for them to go. After all, PS2 emulation is pretty much solid on a high end PC, and that's with all the HD bells and whistles thrown in. If a bunch of programmers can accomplish that for fun, I don't see how it'd be a challenge for Sony to develop their own PS4 specific emulation software. After all, who would know the PS2's hardware quirks better than Sony themselves? Plus, if I could insert my ps1/ps2 discs into my ps4 and they could be played using emulation, that'd be amazing.

I'm gonna assume the PS4 has more than enough horses under the hood to emulate a ps1 and ps2. The ps3, not so much.

I figure there will at least be the Gaikai solution, if nothing else.

I definitely don't expect ps3 to be emulated, and I can live with that. The CELL processor is a motherfucker to begin with, and even if the PS4 is considerably more powerful, PS3 emulation would be, at it's best, glitchy and unreliable. I remember when I first bought my ps3 in 2008, it was marketed as being backwards compatible, so I was going to throw away my old, nearly broken PS2. I tried Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal on it and the framerate was unbearable. I thought maybe it was just a fluke, or my disc was scratched. Then I tried a few more games, and some of them worked fine-ish, but others wouldn't even boot. I was pretty pissed, and luckily the garbage man didn't come yet because that ps2 was about to be hauled away to the great beyond. Later when Sony began rolling out PS2 classics, I realized that the PS3 could handle it, but games had to be tweaked and adjusted to be properly emulated, which is why there are only a handful of PS2 classics up for download. However, the PS4 should be much more capable of running PS2 emulation.

The official statements so far have been no backward compatibility at all, but they might add it with Gaikai. I hope at some point in the future they at least get PS1 games working natively on it, because i do have a decent collection and play them every so often.

Oh, they'll bring back PS2 classics, and there'll be a solid PS2 emulator, but don't expect your discs to work, 'cause they intend to resell you all that shit. And they know you'll buy it too.

Although, I would really hope purchases made on the current PSN store roll over. That'd be swell.

@captain_clayman said:

They need to pay for the new emulators and debugging them, so it would make sense to diminish that cost by only offering a select few titles at once, and running them on "original" hardware, which can be done better using servers. It's what OnLive tried to do, except instead of beaming PC games around, they can hook up glorified PS1 and PS2 chipsets to servers and get them streaming. Also, no piracy, no trading, no funny business (you don't own it).

Plus: subscription fees. They basically roped in a ton of people in with Plus, it makes sense that you would subscribe to Gaikai games, not buy.

Not entirely happy about that, but I am going to be keeping my Vita around for the few PS1 games I play.

You know, it would be awesome if Sony was able to develop an emulator for PSX and/or PS2 and sell it for $10 on PSN. At which point you can just throw in a PSX/PS2 disk and play it. I don't think it would be possible to do this for the PS3, that architecture is just to hard to emulate.

I'd be totally fine with that too, especially if they offered classics as instant game library titles. But ps2 games for 9.99 isn't too bad, except I already own about 50 on disc.