SCE recruiting emulation experts

Sony Computer Entertainment has begun recruiting specialists in the field of emulation, including experts in compiler development and CPU micro-architecture, to work on a forthcoming project at the company.

No official explanation has been offered by Sony for the recruitment drive, which was reported today by ZDNet Japan - however, it's not hard to work out why the company might want such experts on its staff.

Some speculation has suggested that they might be working on emulating older systems on the PS3, which should technically be powerful enough to emulate the PS2; however, recent initiatives have managed to put most of the core elements of the PS2 onto a single chip which would easily be integrated onto the PS3 board.

There's also the possibility that the team will be working on providing emulation for PSone titles on the forthcoming PlayStation Portable, which is expected to be at least as powerful as a PS2 but will have quite different architecture - thus requiring some form of emulation in order to play PSone games.

However, this doesn't really fit the bill either - as the PSP runs a MIPS processor similar to the one in the PSone, so it would actually run the majority of instructions without being cross-compiled on the fly. Besides, while an onboard emulator would allow Sony to repackage PSone titles on UMD discs and sell them as PSP titles without any changes to the game code, it's equally possible that the company would encourage developers to tweak their games for the new system rather than releasing them as-is, and therefore no emulation would be required.

So, what are the emulation experts going to be working on then? Is Sony going to follow in Sega's footsteps and release a PSone emulator for the PC, alllowing people to download and play games for the system on a pay-per-play basis? This is a system which seems to be working well for Sega's Saturn emulator, after all - but yet it seems to be contrary to Sony's own media centre ambitions for the PSX and PS3.

In the absence of any better solution to the puzzle, we'll have to suggest that the team is working on building aspects of the emulation layer for PSone and PS2 on the PlayStation 3... But we're not convinced that there isn't more to this question than meets the eye.

Update 1: Altered information regarding PSP emulation, added new conclusion