PS3 emulator?

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http://www.cinemablend.com/games/PS3-Emulator-Can-Now-Run-Commercial-Games-62686.html

Looks like the answer now, over a year later is yes. Nearly. A few games run fine (provided your computer is fairly beefy), some you get to the title screens, but hey, great news, yeah? Some of them are playable!

Given the history of emulation, particularly in reference to the Nintendo DS from conception to successful emulation (which was a huge challenge), I'd say you should be able to see this particular emulator fully capable within a year, maybe two. But then there's that thing about computer technology, and well, technology in general. The acceleration of progress from one particular machine to the next machine usually doubles in size and halves in time, so who knows? Maybe this thing will be fully playable in 6 mo's to a year :) Spread awareness of it and perhaps there will be some developers added to the team speeding the process along!
 
*sigh*

Its one thing to make a handful of games run decently, with bugs. Its another to get even 90% of the game library playable. Hence why even PCSX2 still has a host of problems, even a decade later. And the PS2 is SIMPLE to emulate in comparison to the PS3.

Right now, it looks like the focus is on getting the PS3 working via LLE (which is the correct thing to do), but that kills performance. Hell, PCXS2 running LLE is unplayable, due to the 2FPS you get out of it. Next comes HLE, but that introduces many, many bugs that devs will spend the next 20 years ironing out. Don't laugh, you still have almost daily releases of PCSX for the PS1 fixing one bug or another.
 
A year ago it was "we're lightyears from being able to play any games"
Now some games can be played and it's "we're lightyears from being able to play all games"
Lol awesome. Lightyears pass faster than I expected



 


Lightyears aren't a measurement of time
 
I didn't say they are.



 


True, they're a measure of distance. However, I think it still works as a distance for the sake of the point.

That said, I don't expect we'll see PS3 emulators any time soon, and idk who would even want one. An i7-4790K and GTX 780 Ti wouldn't run emulated games at playable framerates or resolutions. There are some PS2 games that an i7 and 780 will struggle with at 1080p.

And by the time a PS3 emulator can be run at playable framerates, we'll be on the PS5 or PS6, and PS3s will go for $20 on eBay as a novelty console. That's assuming Sony is even still around or making consoles by then, considering it took them a decade to turn a profit on the PS3 and the PS4 isn't even selling as well so far.
 

I was referring to the part where he said "lightyears pass faster than I expected"
I understand that someone could say "lightyears away from x result" just like someone could say "miles away from x result"
 


Getting a handful of games to a playable state is actually quite easy to accomplish. Its getting more then that working that's the problem, since you run into all sorts of speed/timing problems. Dolphin is a pretty good example of this. First you create something that works for a handful of titles, then you put in a bunch of speedhacks and workarounds to get some stuff playable, albiet with issues, then, a few years later, you start removing those hacks and start getting the emulator working properly. This process takes a lot of time to accomplish. And emulators like Dolphin don't have to worry about multi-core threading, maintaining cache coherency across CPUs, and the like, all of which eats performance. So yes, if I make a bunch of assumptions, I can make a PS3 emulator that runs a handful of popular games, but nothing else will run due to all the hacks I put in to get those games working.
 


It's actually not easy to get a handful of games working, for the ps3/x360 hell, no games work(there's like, 1 video on youtube of a guy playing frogger on the 360, at like 1-3fps). Making a game work properly, even one that's built from the ground up for pc, is a pain in the ass, try using visual studio sometime and doing it. It's so easy to break a game, 1 line of code and boom, crash (not that im like, some insane expert on this stuff, but I've toyed around with c++ n stuff coding for older games, and if it's easy to break an older, well understood game, then imagine how hard it's going to be to make any ps3 game run at acceptable fps).
 
I think one of the main reasons people think they can emulate things like the ps3 and really any next or current gen games is because they see people "emulating" on a console already. It's one thing to run emulation software on hardware made for the task. All they are really doing is changing how the hardware runs its program. In some cases maybe even the program. But this is the root of most confusion. For an emulator to actually emulate (like every single emulator that exists like pcsx2, pSX, stella, nulldc, snes9x etc..) they need to recreate the entirety of the hardware so that technically theres a virtual console and the game loads into it as normally as you would on the real thing, xbox emulators never did that, so they failed and died, however.... recently a guy called espes did a breakthrough and used Qemu to create something that might just be the only hope left for an xbox emulator, but no news aside from its github page exists, it was/is called "xqemu" .
The only thing capable of emulating xbox games and actually playing them, is non other than the xbox same with the ps3 and newer systems. The only other hope you have is seeing if your game was also made for the ps2 (then use pcsx2 to play it) or to the gamecube (use dolphin for that) or lastly, if it was made for the pc
It's simply a hardware issue at this point. Go buy a ps3 for cheep then mod it. Problem solved.
 
I like this thread. Thanks for pointing out rpcs3. I think I'll check out how far rpcs3 has actually progressed - I don't really believe it should be years before we can emulate the platform. I have never written an emulator myself, but I do have quite a bit of expertise in embedded, PPC, JIT, etc. - Considering current processing power, doesn't seem that hard to JIT-emulate 8-PPC cores on a IA32. Graphics interfaces, OS, fiirmware etc are the real beasts if you ask me.
 


Generally, emulating a single CPU core, like the PS2,GC, Wii, or XBox isn't a problem, since X86 generally has all the instructions needed to handle instruction conversion. The problem is there's SEVEN (one is fused off) CPUs to manage, which includes their local caches. So in order to keep the cache in order, you need to put many, many software locks in the code, which kills performance. I'd argue there biggest pure performance loss is going to be managing the PS3s memory state.

You also have the problem of emulating the timings of a multicore CPU on a multicore CPU. There's a reason why almost every emulator runs on a single core, and that's to ensure proper timings. Dolphin is really the only one that's seriously toyed with a Dual Core option, but even that has issues with core desyncs.

Look at is this way: Dolphin has been around for about 6 years now. It's made significant progress in the past two, going from barely usable to a very high quality emulator. That's fits with a normal 5 year development cycle. But even then, some titles, such as LOZ:TP, are simply too beastly to emulate without resorting to game specific hacks to increase performance. My point being: If we can't even emulate every GC title at full speed yet, how do you think doing the PS3 is going to look?
 


Not really, if I go by gamerk316's logic - Though, other than the sync part I don't fully agree with it.

By his logic, you'll face the same problem on x86 unless you have very similar hardware as the PS4 - Which is to say unless you have at least 8 cores, the common memory contention issue comes in.

 


There's a reason we don't have an XBOX emulator yet, despite that running on a modified Pentium III.

See:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=48088464&postcount=26

You need to emulate the CPU, not the architecture. Essentially, you're emulating a Pentium III, right down to the internal bus timings, in software. That is not a trivial task to perform. Then you have all the underpinnings of the CPU that are not understood. Emulating OoO architectures is near impossible if you don't know the exact reordering algorithm used internal to the CPU, so right there, you lose a TON of performance since you are now reduced to running instructions in a non-OoO fashion. And so on and so forth.

Its doable, but will take well over a decade. I think the XBOX and WiiU may be the last two consoles to ever get emulated, honestly, simply due to complexity.
 
Tomshardware never disappoints.

God people...

Yes their is a PS3 emulator avail. It plays very few games completely, many get "in game" however.

No it won't be "years" for any part of the process be it hardware nor development.

Current high end hardware will be adequate.

Misinfo is like e-aids
 
What for it'd be useless unless your just trying to play console exclusives because like 90% are on PC and the 15% are exclusives so I wouldn't see much to this.
 
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