> During the development of the PlayStation, MIPS was offering the R3000A series of processors.
The TMPR5900 (the MIPS chip developed by Toshiba to power the PS2) was sufficiently complex to develop that we developed a cycle-accurate simulator so Sony (and a few game developers) could start development before hardware was available.
However emulation isn't always the best approach: the PS2 (at least the first edition) implemented back compatibility by simply including a PS1 on board. That's a kind of Moore's law in that the cost of doing so had dropped so much since the original PS introduction that it was worth it.
The TMPR5900 (the MIPS chip developed by Toshiba to power the PS2) was sufficiently complex to develop that we developed a cycle-accurate simulator so Sony (and a few game developers) could start development before hardware was available.
However emulation isn't always the best approach: the PS2 (at least the first edition) implemented back compatibility by simply including a PS1 on board. That's a kind of Moore's law in that the cost of doing so had dropped so much since the original PS introduction that it was worth it.