[MBCook]

That was common for consoles at that time. The PS2 couldn’t actually run PS1 games, it just fell back to a PS1 embedded in the system. Same way the GBA played GB/GBC games.

Apple wasn’t a great example but it was the best I could think of. It took Apple 10 years to go from the A4 in the first iPhone with an Apple chip to the M1 in the first Mac. They also were just using Arm, the same instructions that they had been using before and something well understood.

They didn’t suddenly release something people weren’t really prepared for like a Transputer and just declare “this will be everywhere within three years“. They let the switch take its time as necessary.

Sony had the arrogance to do both of those.

[bigstrat2003]

> That was common for consoles at that time. The PS2 couldn’t actually run PS1 games, it just fell back to a PS1 embedded in the system.

Also, the PS3 did the same for PS2. Sony eventually did away with that to cut costs, but the launch models had it.

[Waterluvian]

The software emulator was terrible, sadly. A whole collection of games didn’t work well.

[astrange]

> They also were just using Arm, the same instructions that they had been using before and something well understood.

Apple switched to (and largely invented) ARMv8/AArch64 in the middle of that, which is very different from the ARMv7 they started with.

[MBCook]

True. What I meant was when the A4 came out it could still run the code that was already in the App Store. Ignoring all other hardware, the Cell couldn’t natively run PS2 code.