While Nintendo fights emulator creators, Sony works with them to bring video game classics to life on PS5

Game news While Nintendo fights emulator creators, Sony works with them to bring video game classics to life on PS5

Endless discussion?

The world of emulation has been shaken up somewhat by the Nintendo/Yuzu affair, but it may not be tomorrow that this ecosystem will disappear. The line between the piracy of games still on the market and the indomitable desire of nostalgic players to preserve entire sections of video games history, by any means, is a thin one, but a real legal framework needs to be found. The number of games that are no longer accessible, including digital stores, is simply insane and their disappearance is often a terrible blow to creators. Robin Lavallee, CEO of Implicit Conversions, the French company behind numerous ports of PS5 to PS1 games, explains:

There are many forgotten games that are completely lost today due to physical and legal reasons.

was asked by the site Time dilation, Robin Lavallée has a long CV in the video game industry. He was Ubisoft’s lead programmer on Assassin’s Creed III, worked on code (as a manager) on XCOM 2, and we owe him ports like Resident Evil: Revelations 2 on PS Vita. He began designing implicit conversions to ensure the preservation of video games and specialized in building tools that allowed older games to run on current machines. To achieve this challenge while respecting the law, they reverse engineer and rewrite the BIOS version. At the same time, they have developed a number of tools (which replace the official development libraries) to help with their conversion. 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 may have approached them and the discussion would be conducive to making more ports of PlayStation titles to the PlayStation 5.

My co-founder and friend, Jack Stein, worked on PCSX2, a PlayStation 2 emulator, before joining Sony PlayStation to work on PS2 games for the PS4. After he left, we approached Sony to start an experiment to simulate more. One contract led to another, and we started hiring people to help us on this journey. I would like to say that we started this as a project, and it became a business by mistake

The idea behind the SYRUP engine is to make it an accessible tool for all, like the Unity engine, so that all studios can take advantage of it and work to protect video games. As Robin Lovely points out, “ The best thing about old games is that they are already done. There is no question whether the game is good or not. All we have to do is recompile it, update some aspects and release it again.

» There remains an unknown and which is not trivial in Japan: the code of many games is completely lost (especially in Japan) and until the conversion is attempted again like in the days of Amiga and Atari ST (arcade machines to take video), this Productions are often lost forever. Regardless, these are indeed avenues for the future that will allow a good number of video game productions to experience a second life. And this, completely legally.

Important note : The first article published on Time Extension reported PlayStation 2 games on PlayStation 5, but apparently there was a mistake and the paper was later corrected.