Sony and Mark Cerny, the system architect of the last two generations of the PlayStation, have patented a technology that enables backward compatibility of older games on an unspecified machine. The server first informed about the matter RespawnFirst.
The patent, which is dated February of this year, is publicly available. It would loosely translate as “SOFTWARE BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY TESTING IN A MODE THAT ATTEMPTS TO INDUCE DISTORTION”. In short, it's about solving a problem that occurs when the original machine had more or less power than the machine we are trying to play the game on. I'm sure most players have tried to run an older game on new Windows, but the game didn't work. This is exactly the problem we are talking about.
The idea of the patent is that we have two machines here. On the first one, we subject the game to something like a stress test, exposing it to conditions that are not native to the machine in question. We get a bunch of errors, but we can solve them. Once we solve them, it is more chance that the game will run on a second, more advanced machine.
So much for technique. It is important to mention that the patent does not mention any console from the PlayStation stable on behalf of. Still, quickly there have been speculations that this is an attempt to port games from the PlayStation 3 on PlayStation 5or even down to the hypothetical PlayStation 6.
PS3 backwards compatibility is highly requested by fans, and since the previous generation, i.e. PS4. But Sony has not satisfied the players yet. In 2017, the former director of Sony Jim Ryan (then still from the position of head of marketing) expressed that there is indeed backward compatibility a desired feature, but rarely used.
“I was at a Gran Turismo event and they had PS1, PS2, PS3 and PS4 games. PS1 and PS2 games looked ancient, who would even play it?“ he spoke in favor at the time TIME.
But we got backwards compatibility on PlayStation 5, but only with PS4. It should be added that the PS3 included Cell processorwhich had a completely different architecture than AMD and Intel, so game development was more complicated on the console. This may be one of the reasons Sony hasn't come up with backwards compatibility yet.