With the announcement of the PlayStation Now cloud streaming service, many fans had been hoping that the PlayStation 4 would be able to play games found on previous PlayStation consoles. Now, a new report indicates that a separate emulator for PlayStation 1 and 2 games may make it on to the console separate from PlayStation Now.

According to an anonymous source that spoke to Digital Foundry, Sony is looking to create an internal emulator for the PlayStation 4 so that games originally launched for the PlayStation 1 and 2 can be played on the console with native HD resolutions. This would prevent the blurry upscaling seen when the PlayStation 3 would run games from those eras and potentially lead to the same quality of graphics seen on many of the HD remakes released for the PlayStation 3.

This is good news for PlayStation 4 owners as the console is unable to play games from any previous Sony consoles, not even digital copies of older games, despite the fact that the PlayStation 4 is capable of reading physical game disks from other systems.

Having an internal emulator may also make sense from a quality standpoint compared to PlayStation Now. Requiring users to download a game locally to the PlayStation 4 may help the image quality and decrease input latency as opposed to a cloud streaming game. In addition, offering a game as a download may be cheaper than offering the same game through PlayStation Now due to bandwidth requirements for streaming a game continuously.

When PlayStation Now was first announced at CES 2014, many had assumed that Sony would be using the service to bring games from all PlayStation platforms to the service. However, it has now become apparent that PlayStation Now will only work for PlayStation 3 games, so releasing an emulator for older games makes sense. After all, Sony has a huge amount of classic games that have appeared on the PlayStation 1 and 2, and the ability to replay these games with updated graphics would be a welcome addition to PlayStation 4 owners. Considering the lack of backwards compatibility on the PlayStation 4, bringing an emulator to the console would make much more sense than releasing a huge wave of HD remake collections or other such titles to the new console.