A newly published patent has sparked rumours about future Sony consoles and backwards compatibility.
As reported by Gearnuke, the patent (via ResetEra) – entitled “remastering by emulation” – was published on 2nd October 2018 by Sony Interactive Entertainment America.
However, if you look at the “filed date” a few lines down, you’ll see the application was initially made on 22nd November 2016.
The full application – which certainly appears to be legitimate – is pretty overwhelming, but it essentially details the live remastering of textures from old games and replacing them “on the fly” with shiny new ones better suited to contemporary resolution displays.
“Each asset such as a texture called for by legacy software such as a legacy computer game software has a unique identifier associated with it,” the patent explains. “The unique identifier can be rendered by imposing a hash on the asset, and then the asset stored with its identifier in a data structure. An artist remasters the textures for presentation on a higher resolution display than envisioned in the original software, and stores them back in the data structure with their identifiers.