Ever since the PlayStation Portable was infamously cracked wide open, Sony consoles have become a source of focus and pride for the homebrew development scene, even as Sony’s measures to combat them have scaled up accordingly. Now, a fascinating new development has come to light. Homebrew hackers have figured out how to get PlayStation 2 games to run on PlayStation 4s.
The software runs much like PlayStation emulation worked back on the PlayStation Portable. Homebrew hackers essentially reverse-engineered the “wrapper” used for the official PlayStation 2 on PlayStation 4 line, allowing users to inject their own PlayStation 2 ISO files into the software. This allows pretty much any PlayStation 2 game to run using the same software shell as official releases.
There is a catch, of course. First of all, custom firmware stuff is risky business, for a variety of obvious reasons. Second, the current hacked firmware requires a PlayStation 4 to have the 4.05 firmware, which is from 2016. Running anything beyond that means no dice. So while most users won’t be able to easily play with this stuff, it’s a cool technical milestone either way.
Source: Digital Foundry