PS2 psp compatability curiousity

Ok Now I may be totally wrong here on all sides of this thought but here we go.

Its my understanding that the PSP is more powerful then the PS2. yes? While they may not be the most functional why isn't it possible to play ps2 games on it. Is it a space (mem card size) issuse a Hardware issuse just something I've been thinking about and I wanted to ask others. I'm sure someone else has had this thought but i didn't see another thread for it.

All shades of gray...

I'm not an engineer or an expert but I'll share what I know. Most consoles can't be accurately compared to each other because almost none of them use the same CPU and/or instruction set.
The PS2 and PSP both have MIPS CPUs that run at roughly the same clock speed but their instruction sets aren't identical. That's the first strike against easy PS2-PSP emulation; there's more.
The PS2s CPU can run two instructions per clock cycle under certain circumstances, so any games that make use of that operatin will automatically be stricken from PSP compatibility.
The PS2 and PSP have completely different mathematic/vector coprocessors (the PS2 actually has 2 and the PSPs is specialized specifically for 3D).
Now to be fair the PSP has about half screen surface to draw to than the PS2 does (480x272 compared to 640 x 480) so it has an advantage there but none the less the way the PS2 and PSP work are too different to allow simple emulation.
Sony could probably retool a large portion of the PS2 library to work on the PSP without too much trouble but there won't be any way for end-users to simply rip their PS2 games for use on the PSP the way we can with PSone games.

well said. Thanks that actually makes alot of sense. And appearently you're right about the ps2 to psp conversion. I was just reading an article about a developer stating the port process is surprisingly easy for them. oh well it was a thought.

Yep the PS2 and the PSP are similar, it's easy for a developer, just not plug-and-play easy like it is for PSone...