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. kibwen · 1789584322 · focus · HN ↗

         > most games will run on future hardware.

         I'm starting to get uncertain about how much longer there will even exist future Playstation hardware. Apple and Google phones have devoured the casual/mobile gaming market and as that market hits saturation they'll be eyeing the prestige AAA gaming market. It's not hard to imagine that a modern iPhone or flagship Android has the hardware chops to run something like GTA 6 at an acceptable level of quality. Continuing the GTA 6 example, it's not hard to imagine Rockstar taking one look at the TAM of current-gen console owners vs. the TAM of high-end phone owners and realizing how much more money they could be making by porting it to the majority platform. With the right games signed on (GTA, FIFA, Madden, COD), all it would take is either Apple or Google releasing a $100 dock-plus-controller to absolutely blow the traditional console makers out of the water; everyone either needs or already has a phone, and nobody needs a dedicated game console.

         The point being, it's not much comfort to preservationists to consider the longevity of a proprietary platform that might realistically be defunct in a decade. I don't know if there will be a PS7, but I tend to doubt there will ever be a PS8.

         1. mywittyname · 1789765978 · focus · HN ↗

            You're right, IMHO. Platform convergence is already here and I think Minecraft represents the epoch for it. Kids growing up today are used to playing Minecraft on anything, and that will probably grow to be their expectations going forward. Just log into your account from any computing device and play the game.

            Playstation will probably stick around, but it will probably eventually become a Switch/Vita. There's still value in a platform that is a strict set of hardware requirements that are designed ground up for gaming. Plus, Sony & Nintendo have great development studios making games people want to play.

            Tying this back to preservation - there's probably a large number of games that are not preservable due to their "GaaS" model. But anything single player built for Android will be around forever since 99% of the software for it is cracked not long after release. I'm not sure about the iPhone stuff though.

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