Everything You Wanted To Know About Playstation 3

Backward compatibility

Sony stated every PlayStation and PlayStation 2 game that observes its respective system’s TRC (Technical Requirements Checklist) will be playable on PS3 at launch. SCE president Ken Kutaragi asked developers to adhere to the TRC to facilitate compatibility with future PlayStations, stating that the company was having some difficulty getting backward compatibility with games that had not followed the TRCs. It has been confirmed (image) that initial PS3 units will

include the CPU/rasterizer combination chip used in slim PS2 (EE+GS) to achieve backward compatibility. Two days after the release of the PlayStation 3 in Japan, Sony announced that some titles had problems, mostly with sound playback. Most of the 7841 titles in Sony’s database work; future firmware updates will provide more compatibility. PlayStation and PlayStation 2 software will still be limited by region-locking and will not be enhanced or upscaled.

The PlayStation 3 does not include interfaces for legacy PlayStation devices, but there will be an adapter for the memory cards so users can save their PS1/PS2 data on to a virtual memory card in the hard drive. USB devices for PlayStation 2 may be compatible with PlayStation 3. PlayStation 3 can use Memory Sticks to store save data for PlayStation and PlayStation 2 software.

Games

All PlayStation 3 games will be region-free.

Game development

The PlayStation 3 is based on open and publicly available application programming interfaces. Despite earlier rumours of programming being difficult, IGN reports that they were told that the dev kit “seemed extremely adaptive and easy to program for”. Sony has selected several technologies and arranged several sublicensing agreements to create an advanced software development kit for developers. In addition, in 2005 Sony purchased SN Systems, a former provider of Microsoft Windows-based development tools for a variety of console platforms; including PlayStation 2, GameCube, PSP and Nintendo DS to create additional GNU development tools.

The open standards are specified by the Khronos Group, and are intended to work with Nvidia’s Cg programming language. Scene data are stored with COLLADA v1.4, an open, XML-based file format.[48] Rendering uses PSGL, a modified version of OpenGL ES 1.0 (OpenGL ES 2.0 compliant except for the use of Cg instead of GLSL), with extensions specifically aimed at the PS3. Other specifications include OpenMAX, a collection of fast, cross-platform tools for general “media acceleration,” such as matrix calculations, and OpenVG, for hardware-accelerated 2D vector graphics. These specifications have GPL, free for any use, and/or commercial implementations by third parties.

Sublicensed technology includes complete game engines, physics libraries, and special libraries. Engines include Epic’s Unreal engine 3.0. Physics libraries include AGEIA’s PhysX SDK, NovodeX, and Havok’s physics and animation engines. Other tools include Nvidia’s Cg 1.5 (a C-like shading language, which HLSL was based upon), SpeedTree RT by Interactive Data Visualization, Inc. (high-quality virtual foliage in real time), and Kynogon’s Kynapse 4.0 “large scale A.I.”.

Sony has considered using IPv6, the next generation of the Internet Protocol.