They are clearly able to emulate the games based on the PS1 and PS2 games being available on the digital storefront.
Edit: Thank you all for the informative replies.
In: Technology
>Why are PS4 and PS5 unable to read PS1 or PS2 discs?
For the same reason a VHS player isn’t able to read an SD card. It’s not built for that kind of application. The PS4’s and PS5’s drives are physically unable to read CDs, only Bluerays and DVDs.
Former game developer here,
Those games may be ports, not emulations. Emulation isn’t trivial, and there likely isn’t an emulator that shipped with the system. Even if there were, the hardware likely couldn’t emulate the older platforms in a performant manner.
PS1 and some PS2 disks are based on the CD standard. The drive in a PS4 (and I assume PS5) doesn’t read CDs. Among other things it’s only equipped with lasers for DVD (650nm) and Blu-ray (450nm).
CD, DVD and BluRay all use different lasers with different wavelengths. A lot of commercial players like the ones you get for computers or media players does come with multiple lasers that can read all disk formats. However PlayStation have chosen to save some cost by only including one laser. There are also some other differences in the tracking mechanism which makes them incompatible. They used the tracking of the grove in the CD to prevent illegal copying of the disks but this made the hardware a bit more complicated which they did not add to the later DVD and BluRay players in the later versions.
The “system” costs money to put it in. It needs special drivers. Also, the physical media is different throughout the generations. You’d need 3-5 lasers to read the disks.
Another major issue that you might not have considered is that CdS have a sampling rate of 44.1khz and blue ray have a sampling rate of 96 khz so not only would you need different lasers for reading you would also need different digitizing circuits and probably different filters for both. That would get very pricey very quickly.
A lot of useful replies relating to the disc reading technologies, but there’s another reason, even if emulation is possible, it takes quite a toll on the hardware,.
Since there’s competition, they’d rather choose a master of one instead of jack of all trades approach.
Also, as technology grows, there are a lot of changes in a console/computer/smartphone architecture, which further complicates emulation beacause the build platform (instruction sets, 8/16/32/64 bits, number of cores, gpu and cpu hardware, etc).
Several reasons. But the main ones are quite simple.
Fully emulating a console so it works with all discs would be difficult. Games they control can be modified to work (assuming they use emulation in the first place – they might be ports)
They don’t make any money from you if you use existing games.
The disc producers aren’t able to recreate the same data they used for those discs as they do with current models, the PS4 and PS5.
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