Game news While Nintendo battles emulator creators, Sony works with them on PS5 to bring video game classics back to life
A few days ago, the affair between Nintendo and the Yuzu team made a lot of noise and the designers of the emulator, who are also at the origin of Citra, the Nintendo 3DS emulator, decided to throw away the sponge by finding a financial agreement with the Japanese giant. At the same time, other publishers work with these emulation specialists to satisfy players.
An endless debate?
The world of emulation has been somewhat shaken since the Nintendo / Yuzu affair, but it is probably not tomorrow that this ecosystem will disappear. The line is thin between the piracy of games still on the market and the irrepressible desire of nostalgic players wanting to preserve, by all means, entire sections of the history of video games, but a real legal framework would still need to be found. The number of games that are no longer accessible, including on digital stores, is absolutely insane and their disappearance is often a terrible blow to the creators themselves. This is what Robin Lavallée, the CEO of Implicit Conversions, a French company, behind numerous ports of PS1 games to PS5, explains:
There are too many forgotten games that have been completely lost today, for material and legal reasons.
Asked by the site Time Extension, Robin Lavallée has a long CV in the video game industry. He was Ubisoft’s lead programmer on Assassin’s Creed III, worked on the code (as manager) on XCOM 2 and we owe him ports like Resident Evil: Revelations 2 on PS Vita. He embarked on the creation of Implicit Conversions to ensure the preservation of video games and specialized in the creation of tools that allow old games to run on current machines. To achieve this challenge while respecting the law, they reverse engineer and rewrite BIOS versions. At the same time, they have developed numerous tools (which replace the official development libraries) to help them with their conversions. Their in-house engine, SYRUP, is now capable of running retro games on PS5, Xbox Series and Nintendo Switch. And that’s just the beginning.
Even more PS1 games on PS5?
According to the person concerned, Sony would have contacted them and the discussion would be conducive to creating even more ports of PlayStation titles on the PlayStation 5.
My co-founder and friend, Jake Stine, worked on PCSX2, the PlayStation 2 emulator, before joining Sony PlayStation to work on PS2 games for the PS4. After he left, we contacted Sony to launch an experiment to do more emulation. One contract led to another, and we started hiring people to help us on this journey. I like to say we started this as a project, and it became a business by mistake
The idea behind the SYRUP engine would be to make it a tool accessible to all, like the Unity engine, so that all studios can benefit from it and act for the preservation of video games. As Robin Lavallée points out, “ The best thing about old games is that they’re already done. There’s no questioning whether the game is good or not. All we have to do is recompile it, update some aspects and re-release it. » There remains an unknown and which is far from trivial in Japan: the code of many games has been completely lost (especially in Japan) and unless conversions are re-attempted like in the days of Amiga and the Atari ST (in taking video of arcade machines), these productions are most likely lost forever. Regardless, these are truly avenues for the future that would allow a good number of video game productions to experience a second life. And this, completely legally.
Important note : A first article published on Time Extension reported PlayStation 2 games on PlayStation 5, but there was obviously an error and the paper was subsequently corrected.