One of the sadnesses of the bounding advances in gaming tech which come every five years or so is the fact that with every new machine, you have to wave goodbye to a tranche of games you've spent a long time growing to love. What if I suddenly fancy running through Croc: Legend of the Gobbos one wet Sunday afternoon? What then?

That might come to an end with the PlayStation 5, though. As reported by TechSpot, Sony has filed a patent (which you can read here, if you fancy brushing up on your Japanese) which would allow the next generation console to emulate all of its predecessors, right back to the original 1995 PlayStation.

According to this article on the patent - which, por cierto, is en Español - it's the work of PS4 designer Mark Cerny, and works by something called 'processor ID spoofing'. Basically, that means the new hardware mimics how the old hardware used to interact with the old software, to get around how previous gen games' data is overwritten so quickly by newer machines with faster CPUs that the games won't work.

Obviously, patents don't necessarily equal inclusion, and this whole innovation would feel a lot more like it were certain to happen if it were written somewhere in English, but equally you shouldn't chuck your collection of every Pro Evo since 2001 into the Oxfam bin just yet.