https://twitter.com/libretro/status/1719855987937411346?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^tweet
Can’t wait!
PCSX2 savestates, PCSX2 savestates, PCSX2 savestates…
…am prob not the only one hoping for this!
Purely out of curiosity, can anyone explain why this is ?
All I can think is maybe the PS2 console used to emulate the PS1, so you’re kind of asking the emulator to emulate an emulator, if that makes sense?!
In any case, I guess the core / emu would also need to be made to support the PS1 memory card files anyway, so additional, unnecessary hassle involved when there are already dedicated PS1 cores; IIRC, you needed to use a PS1 memory card on the PS2 console to play PS1 games, you couldn’t just directly save/load to/from a PS2 memory card…
PS2s didn’t emulate PS1, they actually had PS1 hardware inside (similar to Super Game Boy, etc.), so that additional hardware would need to be emulated, as well, which is a huge amount of work (similar to Super Game Boy lol)
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Ah, right, gotcha; to be honest, the ‘emulator emulating an emulator’ thing was a possible suggestion a dev friend of mine gave me when I was trying to get to the bottom of this waaaaaay back, but he wasn’t sure himself with this scenario!
Awesome… looking forward to another new RetroArch.
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Of course you are not the only one. It’s just that long time RA users tend to be less optimistic and a bit more skeptical about such announcements and promises. If this time something comes out of it then awesome. Until then, i’ll keep my expectations medium to low.
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And this right here is why we don’t tell anyone what we’re working on anymore. So, when people say they want more info and news, I hope you’ll step up and say “no, we would rather hear nothing in case something doesn’t meet my expectations.”
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None of us has the right to ‘expect’ any improvement of something which is already awesome in it’s current guise, when we’re all getting it for free; we can ‘hope’ tho.
So here’s hopin’ y’all keep up the amazing work! Appreciate it!
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But people are also saying positive things, already, about such an announcement. Just soak that in and ignore the Debbie Downers. I know that can be hard, but there will be plenty of people excited about this announcement. 
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I want to add another source of information besides what was already said, why its not recommended to play PS1 games on a PS2. The original PS2 hardware could not play all PS1 games anyway and had trouble with some. So even if you perfectly emulate the PS2 and its backwards compatibility software, add the support for the PS1 chip emulated in the already complicated PS2 emulator, then the universe will collapse into a black hole.
Okay, maybe not that dramatic, but here is the article if you want read more about it (good ol’ Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PlayStation_games_incompatible_with_PlayStation_2
And while I did some research, I found this very interesting article from the engineer himself. I did not read it yet, its a bit long, but looks very interesting: https://freelansations.medium.com/the-story-of-the-ps2s-backwards-compatibility-from-the-engineer-who-built-it-ec39cf5a0353
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I have an official PS2 controller query for this official PS2 core thread.
I’ve been ‘tweaking my controller remaps’ recently (not a euphemism), started by deleting my autoconfig folder and recreating it using the ‘Update Controller Profiles’ option from the RA menus.
When I plugged in my official DualShock 2 controllers, they were recognised as some pretty random controller type out of the many available in the new dinput folder that’d been downloaded (I think it was the ‘SPEED-LINK Competition Pro .cfg’). Not too much of a problem as I just renamed and edited this .cfg file to suit my needs, however I was surprised to find I even needed to do this; should they not be recognised as official DualShock 2 controllers right off the bat? I would have anticipated the DS2 to be a pretty common dinput controller type; granted, I’ve still got them plugged in via some el cheapo USB adapters like these, however I’m even more confused by the fact that the vid/pid values on my existing .cfg files were different to those of the speed-link one, even though I’ve never changed the USB adapters, so not sure what’s going on there.
It’s all working well now, I’m happy to share my ‘hacked’ .cfg file if it’s of any use and I understand that rumble functions won’t work with these controllers without some wrapper middleware like XOutput; but some of the inputs did take me quite a bit of time and effort to work out and remap (I’m looking at you, analogue sticks…) so if anyone can enlighten me, I’d be keen to understand why such a well-known, offical Sony controller still wouldn’t just be recognised as such for me immediately once plugged in.
those old console controllers don’t have any vid/pid of their own. RetroArch only sees the adapter.
Ah, so much the same way as how my Mayflash adapter is picked up by RA, not my Saturn controllers. Thanks.
Also, my bad, it wasn’t the speed-link one, my DS2 (adapters) pick up the ‘Defender Game Racer Turbo GT.cfg’. This one does match my old vid/pid, namely:
input_vendor_id = “2064”
input_product_id = “3”
so that now makes a little more sense, at least.
My Win10 Device Manager shows the DS2 adapter properties as:
Device HID\VID_0810&PID_0003\7&3b54bad&c&0000
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i think to some point it not might be possible and will be useless as there are no changes at software nor hardware level when the ps2 fat was running natively the ps1, at some point in their ps2 manufacturation, sony decided to remove the ps1 hardware from the ps2 motherboard because it was overheating things and they wanna reduce their costs, actually this is the same reason they did the same in ps3
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They did indeed, it was only ever one of the original ‘fat’ PS3 (60gb variant?) which actually had PS2 hardware inside it, I think.
All this is bugging me now! Because in much the same way, I have a PS2 slim and could’ve sworn it emulated PS1, whilst the original fat PS2 models had actual PS1 hardware inside but happy to stand corrected. If there is indeed PS1 hardware inside the PS2 slim, it’s pretty awesome how they managed to squeeze it in there! What a great console it was.
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I never looked too much into it, but apparently only some of the slims had the PS1 hardware and later revisions replaced it with a PowerPC chip and at least some amount of emulation. https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps2/IOP/Deckard
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They do partial emulation on every console I believe because of the GPU etc. but originally the main cpu was in also in the PS2 as IOP. “Popstarter” is supposed to be a launcher for Sony’s leaked emulator, you can use that with the PS2 on hdd, makes things way more practical. Ultimately there’s little reason to use a PS2 emulator that also includes backwards compatibilty though, unless you improve it over the original.
Quoting an excerpt of the link you posted
Blockquote “Once I was brought onto the PlayStation 2 team, I was given the task of making PS1 games play on the new system. Back then, it was normal for your old games to not be able to run on newer consoles, but SCE wanted to buck that trend, which I thought was forward-thinking of them. Given how I had only been with the company for a few years at that point, too, I was really pleased that I was allowed to work on something so important.”
I guess they didn’t heard about the SMS being backwards compatible with the SG-1000/2000, the Mega Drive being totally backwards compatible with the SMS, the Game Gear having and adapter for the SMS then. True that Nintendo never (until the Wii which is a GameCube+) never cared about this, but it was mostly a standard for SEGA as their consoles evolved from previous iterations until the Saturn came about.
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Yeah, I’ve used POPSTARTER on my slim model a bit to load PS1 games from a USB flash drive. It’s a hassle to get set up but works surprisingly well after that. It’s definitely an impressive feat of engineering!
re: backwards compatibility in the gaming industry in general, I sometimes wonder how different (if any) the industry would be if Nintendo had followed through with SNES -> NES BC (would more advanced NES games have been released, pushing mappers like MMC5 to their limits?), or conversely, if they had never bothered with the idea at all (e.g., would they have gone with a 68k CPU and avoided SNES’ biggest bottleneck?).
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I remember reading or watching that the SNES was to be, at some point during its development, backwards compatible with the NES and there are parents in these videos, complaining that the expensive games they bought their kids wouldn’t work on the next 16-bit console.
Personally I think this was yet one more reason why the Genesis had such a success in the US alone during the early 90’s, not too dissimilar how the PS1 had the advantage over the N64 for basically drawing all Nintendo’s third party support to it, and also 99% of consumers saw CDs as the right media at the time, and it was, right?
As for the SNES bottlenecks, I don’t think they would use Sharp CPUs, I mean, even the Famicom/NES (1983) didn’t use the more standard Zilog z80 from the 70’s. Maybe it’s how low the SNES Rico’s chip runs natively, paired with those cheap slower memory of the carts, specially early on, now receiving these fan performance mods we’ve been seeing, showing that maybe, the intent of Nintendo was to mostly rely on cartridges extra help.
Ah, also Nintendo is a cheapskate, they would probably only had released the SNES like in 1999 or so (if that), if no other console ever existed in the market to compete against them.
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