Sony Has Patented A New System Of Backwards Compatibility

According to a Japanese blog Sony Japan has just registered a new patent for a system that will allow the PS5 to run any game from previous PlayStation consoles, according to the patent this system will allow the PS5 to tune down its hardware and act like older systems. This was created by Mark Cerny, the lead designer of the PS4 structure.

Read below the translation of the Japanese blog.

“Sony Japan has just registered a new patent that allows the retrocompatibility of the hardware with previous consoles. It is a system to be applied in a future machine, PS5, and that allows the CPU of the new console to be able to “interpret” the central unit of the previous machines. The author of the development was Mark Cerny, the architect who designed the PS4 structure, and the patent, which has been filed under number 2019-503013, briefly explains what it consists of.

“The aim is to make the applications designed for the previous consoles (legacy device) run perfectly on the most powerful hardware, and is focused on eliminating the synchronization errors between the new consoles and the behavior of the previous ones (PS4, PS3, PS2, and PSX). For example, if the CPU of the new console is faster than the previous one, data could be overwritten prematurely, even if they were still being used by another component.

“Thanks to the new system, PS5 would be able to imitate the behavior of the previous consoles, so that the information that arrives at the different processors is returned in response to the “calls” of the games. The processor is able to detect the needs of each application and behave as if it were the original “brain” of each machine, cheating the software. This technology does not prevent PS5 could also have additional processors to have compatibility with machines whose architecture is difficult to replicate, as in the case of PS2.

“In this blog you can see the most detailed information of the patent, with the diagrams in Japanese. Yesterday we explained the SRGAN process that allows you to perform “remastering by emulation” (another of the elements that Sony has patented, and converts images in SD resolution in 4K using artificial intelligence.”

From what this blog reports, this new way of backwards compatibility will let the PS5 to mimic the original requirements of the software it’s trying to support, but by accomplishing this by hardware Sony might deliver a perfect gameplay without differences from the original hardware.

Even though we have a Japanese patents website, we haven’t heard anything official from Sony, so this information should be taken with a pinch of salt, but keep it tuned to Gaming Instincts for more updates.