What A Bargain On Their End
It appears that Sony is using an open source emulator to run games on its upcoming miniature console. This is contrary to the other theories people offered, such as in-house emulation or hardware emulation. The big question is, how will this affect the way the games run on the Playstation Classic?
According to Kotaku’s Chris Kohler, they still run fine. He noted that “the games look and sound accurate,” and that “you could grate a block of cheese” with those jagged pixels. The software in question is PCSX ReARMed. Frank Cifaldi goes into greater detail on the subject on Twitter, defending and explaining the decision to use open source software.
As this is open-source software, you can find all this out in one of the menus within the Classic itself. This discovery can be taken one of two ways: either Sony got wicked lazy, or they could not, with all their powers, make a better emulator than the one developed by a few dedicated nerds. Since it’s quite likely they started working on this shortly after the NES Classic was released, one assumes they at least tried to develop their own software. In the end, it seems they went with the more reliable option. Here’s hoping it wasn’t a mistake, and that these games run beautifully on the Playstation Classic this December.