How will the Playstation 3 handle backwards compatibility of both Playstation and Playstation 2 games? According to Ken Kutaragi, President of Sony Computer Entertainment, the Playstation 3 will utilize a combination of hardware and software.

“It will be done through a combination of hardware and software,” Kutaragi states in an interview with Impress PC Watch. “We can do it with software alone, but it’s important to make it as close to perfect as possible. Third-party developers sometimes do things that are unimaginable. For example, there are cases where their games run, but not according to the console’s specifications. There are times when games pass through our tests, but are written in ways that make us say, ‘what in the world is this code?!’ We need to support backward compatibility towards those kinds of games as well, so trying to create compatibility by software alone is difficult. There are things that will be required by hardware. However, with the powers of the PS3, some parts can be handled by hardware and some parts by software.”

He went on to fling a little more mud Microsoft’s way, saying that the current Xbox machines will become antiquated. He said that “the Xbox will be killing itself. The only way to avoid that is to support 100 percent backwards compatibility from its launch date.”

If I have understood this correctly, Ken probably meant to say that the old Xbox machine will become almost useless, since developers will move forward and only develop for the Xbox 360, whereas developers can still make Playstation and Playstation 2 games; but, that’s pretty much a moot point, I mean how many developers still pump out Playstation 1 games? That’s a pretty silly comparison on Ken’s part.

Provided by Geekstreak