So little mention has been made of PlayStation 4's new PS2 emulator, however the service is now ready and available for gamers to use.
There has been a huge buzz surrounding Star Wars of late and Sony seemingly looks to take advantage of that, with Super Star Wars, Star Wars: Racer Revenge, Star Wars: Bounty Hunter and Star Wars: Jedi Starfighter all accessible via the new emulator.
Given the hype around Xbox One's backwards compatibility feature it seems quite strange that Sony has released something like this with so little fanfare.
On the other hand, Sony's lack of promotion for the new feature could allow them to test the service with low traffic, tweaking and improving the emulator – although that is merely speculation at this point. Although, the emulator's limited selection of games does suggest that this is very much a testing exercise.
Eurogamer has reported that a system prompt will appear while loading the games, all of which are available through a PSN code. The gaming news website has also stated that there is an emulating system in place to handle PS2 memory cards, the vintage PS2 logo appears on-screen and button prompts are very much identical to that of the PS2 – almost confirming the presence of an emulating system.
The service is reportedly an upscale, but not high definition, which is something that has been mentioned in the past when discussing the possibility of an emulator for PS4. However on a flipside, the 3D graphics have been "substantially improved," while increasing in resolution.
Just to give you an idea of how the emulator is performing, Eurogamer has released the following statement:
"Original PlayStation 2 titles ran at a range of pixel counts, but 512×448 and 640×448 were commonplace (God of War 2 even let you choose between the two). It's still early days in our analysis, but first impressions suggest that the emulator resolves a native resolution of 1292×896.
"Two black lines are added top and bottom to the image, before receiving a final upscale up to full 1080p. In effect, we're looking at around 4x the pixel count – possibly higher, depending on the title."
