Ok, I hope this isn't breaking to many forum rules but since I have no established cred on any Sony gaming site, I figured I'd ask here since you guys in this forum might know.

Anyway, I'm in the running with a moderately decent chance of winning a new PS4 Pro through a work-related competition.  I'm not really into new games and, in fact, my house only has a small 21" HD TV so having a PS4 in my living room would be overkill.  Quick googling has told me what I expected-- the PS4 cannot play any older games that you stick in the drive.  Though to some extent this isn't a shock, I was a little surprised to see that even the PS3 was excluded from backwards compatibility.

Aare their any projects out there making any progress in modding/hacking the firmware to run PS1 and PS2 emulators?  I have an extensive library of the two systems and I would like to get rid of the PS2 in my living room if this device could potentially replace it.  I tried to search for such a project but even Google hasn't been any help.  I assume any such project is to fledgling or so far it has just been to difficult to be viable.

Still, the PS4 must have some form of emulator in it if you can download old games through their internal DLC store, correct?  Hopefully this would mean that some mod/hack shouldn't be to far way so that it can piggy-back off of the internal emulation.

Anyway, I'd appreciate the thoughts.  If there probably isn't going to be a hack in the forceable future, I'll probably just sell the system.  Other than wanting to give Final Fantasy VX a play, I'm not really that much interested in new gaming tech.

The PS4 can only stream PS3 games for reverse compatibility. It is a completely different architecture that isn't nearly powerful enough to emulate the PS3 and has no native compatibility.

That said, you can subscribe to PlayStation Now to play potentially hundreds of PS3 games on PS4. It's like, backwards compatibility, Netflix-style.

From what I thought, PS1 and PS2 games aren't emulated, just modified to be read by the PS4 (kind of like making the PS4 think they're PS4 games, but not quite). As CZroe said, the PS3 games are streamed via a server.

The closest I've ever been to emulation on a PS4 is NES. I've gotten Dragon Warrior and SMB to run via a java based emulator running though a web browser without any mods to the console. Couldn't control it and it was a bit slow, but it works.

If someone can tinker with that using Java/HTML 5/etc, maybe we can have a decent way to play older games on the PS4, but probably nothing past the 16 bit era.

Yeah, I only care about PS1 and PS2 games so this is a bummer.

Well, I might want to take it back now, because looking into it, there is indeed some PS1 web-based emulators out there. Even Gamecube! 0_o 

So there's at least hope? But with legality issues, functionality issues, lack of overall interest and possibly nobody's really sat down to figure it out is probably preventing this all to become a reality.





 

On a normal PS4 with old enough firmware, you can install Linux, and then run any emulator that runs on Linux. That means PS1 would work, but I'm not sure about PS2, since PCSX2 (the only PS2 emulator that ever got far enough to run games) was badly coded and requires 32-bit environment. That in turn may not be possible on the PS4's legacy-free arch.

PS4 Pro, not yet to my knowledge, but when they do crack it, you'd get all portable Linux emulators.

The ps4 especially the Pro would have a newer firmware. Even the ps3 on cfw doesnt run all ps2 games the best. Gran Turismo 4 for example. At least with the ps3 hardware.