As for the original subject of this thread, I'm mostly a single-player gamer, so I had plenty of fun with Portal 2, Mass Effect 2, and Sly Cooper 3 while PSN was down. The main thing that affected me was the lack of ability to link my Steam account to the PS3, and the fact that there were 4 PSN games I wanted to purchase that friday, but couldn't. I did cancel and reissue my credit card, but that was only a minor inconvenience.
As for the PS2 emulation thing, some of this seems to be lost to the sands of time and only a few of us geeks actually know the full story behind it.
ShadowKatt said:
ACTUALLY, I don't know why they removed it. I've heard it was a cost cutting measure. I've also heard that it was a conflict issue, though I don't believe that. I didn't get one of the first two waves of PS3s, but mine still does PS1 games. My mate has one of the first two waves and hers does PS1 and 2 games. Now, they don't do it at all, and I can't comprehend it since it still plays CDs and DVDs, just not SONY GAMES. I've also heard it was a way to keep the PS2 relevant, done purposefully so that people would still be forced to buy PS2 hardware(consoles, controllers, memory cards, etc etc).
To emulate PS1 games, a 12 year old platform at the time that was running primarily on a 33mhz MIPS, they went the pure Software emulation route, because the PS1 was simple enough and low end enough to emulated on a 7-core 3.2ghz system. The PS3 still supports PS1 games on disc even now.
To run PS2 games though, they had to build a custom chip. The PS2 was a EE 3-core 300mhz system (That also had a 33mhz mips chip for PS1 emulation) with a fancy graphics chip GS that worked on multilayered textures (that couldn't push that many polygons, in a way it's very similar to the Matrox Parhelia chip,) and an extremely fast common memory bus where the GPU, CPU, and 33mhz MIPS could all talk at high speed. I heard rumors that the chip itself was costing sony more than $60 each because it was not the same chip that they used on the PS2 itself at the time.
They spent at least 2 years trying to emulate the PS2 in software on the PS3, but the best that they could do was emulating the EE 3-core CPU on the Cell, and installing a GS chip to handle the graphics. This was cheaper since it took half the silicon of the EEGS chip, but it was one that they couldn't get economies of scale on since it was only used in the 80gig PS3. (Not to mention being slower than the EEGS chip on some games.) Thus, they decided that it was more trouble than it was worth and took it out for the 40gig PS3 and the PS3 Slim.
OtherOS support is more questionable, they did that because someone broke out of the Linux sandbox and got full access to the GPU, and they were afraid it would lead to piracy. I still think it was a foolish move because removing OtherOS ended up spurring all of the piracy and hacking that followed.
