I bought my son a ps3 with 120mb memory for xmas after being told that it will also play ps2 games. Now we can't get the ps2 games to work. is a download needed ? or was I lied to by sales person ?

PS2 backwards compatibility, no not in the traditional sense. I believe it was found that many of the better game developers circumvented the PS2 operating system and wrote directly to hardware registers to get the utmost performance out of the PS2.

The PS2 supported 1080i and was one of the first Game consoles to do so. This support for High Definition and the limited speed of hardware at that time was the reason for 2000 bit GPU registers.

Combining developers writing to hardware with the PS2 GPU which had an unheard of register size exceeding 2000 bits and you have a problem implementing the PS2 GPU with software only.

Sony's answer; re-release selected PS2 titles with issues corrected and already recompiled to run on the PS3. In addition they are providing support for PSP MINI software to run on the PS3 also.

So the salesman was telling a half truth.

Hi

Unfortunately whoever was giving you this information was mistaken.

This model (120GB) of the PlayStation 3 system is designed to play PlayStation 3 format software and has a limited backward compatibility for PS One games only.

This system is not compatible with and will not play PlayStation 2 format software.

Neither is there a download or upgrade available to rectify this. There is a backward compatibility notice printed on the box which you will find under the features section which will clarify this for you also.

For more information on consoles that are compatible with PS2 games feel free to view my fixya Tip on this subject at this link

http://www.fixya.com/support/r3740168-playing_ps2_games_ps3_check_backwards

If playing PS2 games is an important factor you can only achieve this by sourcing one of the older generation consoles second hand I am afraid.

Sorry to bear this bad news but I do hope it clarifies the issue for you. Thanks for using Fixya.

Well sorry to tell you this but the 120 gig ps3 does not have any backwards capabilities whatsoever. There is no downloads to make ps2 games work. Either the sales person bold faced lied to you, or they had no clue what they were selling. Sony only came out with 2 systems that have backwards capabilities, the 60 and 80 gig systems, although they are limited and the 80 requires a download. Sorry for the headache, if I were you I would give that sales person a good piece of my mind.