Sony's new PlayStation 2 emulator tested - and it's another disappointing effort. Subpar image quality, poor filtering options and bugs do these classics no favours.
Sony's new PlayStation 2 emulator tested - and it's another disappointing effort. Subpar image quality, poor filtering options and bugs do these classics no favours.
Sony is wasting PS5's emulation potential through poor upscaling, disappointing filters and a profound lack of care for its classic PS2 and PSP titles.
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Like, how do you even screw this up? Sony...the ones who have access to all the super secret technical documents, full source codes, CAD drawings, prototypes, probably even people still working there who worked on it originally etc. Things that many who work on the open source emulators can only dream of seeing.
Made a shit emulator.
Creating a good emulator takes a lot of time and money, and that I think is the true reason why.
What they have released is a MVP, a minimum viable product, it checks all the boxes for a releaseable thing and that's what the higher ups, the product leads and other finance stakeholders want to hear.
Additional features or proper scaling? Yeah, nice we put that on the list for MVP+, for sure! When will that come? Nobody knows and we have no development time to work on it because now with the release the focus was shifted to the next project, but it is on the list and we will come back to it.
I have heard that so often in so many projects I was part of, as a grunt with no power, and for nearly all of them I still wait for the MVP+ time to ever happen.
Them, the ones having full control on the platform, failed were foss developpers succeed. They have no excuse.
FOSS developers have no cost reporting, no meetings with C level and stakeholders, no shareholders, no release plans, no schedules. What they have is passion.
They just created what they want to create, they have a deep personal agenda to make something they want to use for themselves and that has to have therefore the polish and quality they want to have it to have.
The corporate developers wanted to make a good product too I am very sure, but if the higher ups say that it has to be released by a fixed date then there is not much that the developers can do about it.
So yes, the company has no real excuses, besides money.
Many situations proved to us that passion make better things, sadly today's AAA game developpers dosn't have any passion anymore, mostly because of pression made by boss who are only driven by money.
Wouldn't it be a lot cheaper to buy a license from an emulator project, hire one or two from the team, and give them access to internal info to help fix things up? Then your internal team just integrates it with the console and you ship it.
That sounds way cheaper than NIH...
There are not much good commercial emulator projects, and open source emulators are not easy to license due to the nature of the open source licences (often GPL 2 or 3) used.
A iot of the FOSS projects are developed by a handful of people, often just one or two. So you buy a licence from those individuals and remove and replace the rest. Or just hire the one or two devs and they can pull in the bits they wrote. You're always free to relicense your work.
And if it's GPL v2, there's no problem because you can probably treat it as "firmware" since it's a console and not a PC (e.g. like TiVo did). GPL v3 blocks that loophole though.
Sounds complicated and like a lot of potential legal trouble, have it done by their own staff seems easier.
They don't want it to succeed.
Why?
Can't add micro transactions or lootboxes to emulated games.
They even messed up the emulation on their PS Classic, despite being based on a simpler console and having full control of the hardware and software.
Sony screws up everything.
It looks like their complaints are primarily about how they handle processing the output (scaling and filters). That's not anything having internal documents helps with.