You would be able to play your favorite PS1 till PS4 games on the new PS5 patent Suggests
A new PS5 patent has recently surfaced showing that the new PS5 will have Backward Compatibility which could be emulated thanks to the cloud which will contains the old PS operating Systems that will help in running the old games.
This first surfaced due to a tweet by user “Renka_schedule” the tweet consisted a picture with Japanese written on it which can be translated as “A large number of game titles across PS1/PS2/PS3 and various generations of game consoles can be stored and used via the cloud gaming library.”
“These games can be run on a virtual machine that mimics the operating system associated with each game console”
This image shows drawings of PlayStation 1, 2 and 3’s operating system being emulated in different screens. It is not shown how it is achieved or is it connected with the Playstation Now services. It can be thought that using virtualised operating servers is easier than building backwards compatibility even though this isn’t mentioned in the patent documents.
It seems Sony is, or at least has considered a PlayStation Now-like solution to the backward compatibility problem, with PS Now already offering some PS2 games. Rather than getting emulation software running on a PS4, or more likely a PS5, it can instead setup a virtual machine in the cloud to emulate a PS1, PS2, or PS3, get a game running there, and stream it to a console.
It’s a clever solution to the problem, and it would allow for physical games to be inserted into a console, and the relevant stream initiated from Sony’s servers all within a few seconds.
Later in another tweet Renka_schedule from another patent which shows that you will be able to record from their gameplay, and share it with friends via the cloud. That looks like it could be associated with the new DualSense controller’s Create button, and previous Sony patents have mentioned “scene tagging”, which could allow players to “record” playable sections of games and share them
Whether this turns into an actual feature or not remains to be seen, but if Sony could launch the PS5 with backward compatibility across all generations of PlayStation hardware (via the cloud), it would take away one of the attack lines Microsoft has. There’s also no reason the same system couldn’t work for PS4 games.
