Thread

1. criddell · 1789561579 · focus · HN ↗

   This will be great for preservation of PS2 games. Well done!

   It seems like preservation of games for later consoles is a lost cause. If I pull out my PS5 30 years from now and pop in my Cyberpunk 2077 disk to play, I'm going to have a barely playable game.

   It's better than nothing, I suppose, but I won't be able to re-play the excellent version that I played through last year.

   1. mywittyname · 1789574084 · focus · HN ↗

      The flip side is:

      1. Playstation purchases seem to follow accounts and most games will run on future hardware.

      2. Cross-platform is near universal now. While you may not be able to play the PS5 version on your PS9, you will likely be able to run the PC version still.

      There's a subset of the preservation community who are focusing on decomp/recomp with PCs as the target architecture. x86 / Windows will outlive all of us, and with the source code, games can be recompiled for newer target architectures. This is trivial with LLMs now (targeting new architectures, not the decomp/recomp - though that has made progress too).

      It's not a perfect solution, but it's good enough, IMHO.

      1. rbanffy · 1789576774 · focus · HN ↗

         > most games will run on future hardware.

         Until Sony decides you no longer own them.

         1. criddell · 1789588636 · focus · HN ↗

            They did this fairly recently with over 500 movies and TV shows. The licensing agreement with StudioCanal ran out and everybody who had one of those titles in their libraries had it removed (stuff like Terminator 2, Total Recall, Paddington, Apocalypse Now, ...).

            Who knows what licensing timebombs exist in Sony games? If the license for music played over some title sequence is lost 30 years from now Sony isn't going to fix the problem. They will just make the game unable to start.

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