Sony seems to have quietly enabled backward compatibility for the PlayStation 4 for PlayStation 2 games, and you can now play them in their upscaled glory.
Microsoft recently enabled backwards compatibility for the Xbox One that lets you play over 100 Xbox 360 titles, which gained them a fair bit of publicity as of late. Sony seems to have done the same for their PlayStation 4 but with a lot less fanfare.
When Eurogamer picked up their Special Edition Star Wars Battlefront PS4 and booted up one of the old PS2 titles it was bundled with(with bundle comes with Super Star Wars, Star Wars: Jedi Starfighter, Star Wars: Racer Revenge and Star Wars: Bounty Hunter) the PS2 logo popped up with each boot. There apparently was also a system in place to emulate PS2 memory cards too.
If the titles were actually ports, then there would be no need to emulate this; so it seems that these would be the first backward compatible titles on the PS4. The emulation even upscaled the titles to the native resolution of 1292 x 896 of the PS4; from the original 640 x 448 and 512 x 448 resolutions. The system does seem to smoothen out the graphics and processing quite a bit, making them feel smoother and cleaner than they did on the original PS2.
With the massive library of games on the PS2 (about 1,850 titles) the PS4 could be getting a huge boost to its currently meager library. Hopefully they have plans for re-releasing PS2 content so more of us can relive our fave games from that period in the PlayStation’s history.
