PS3 Emulator??

[Jay]

We do not need one we allready got SNES, NES, Sega Genesis, Game Boy, Game Boy Color , Atari and arcade Emulators I think this is more than enough Look at all those systems over tens or thousands of games it would take to life times to play them all even if you was cheating maybe even longer

Perhaps we don't need it, but it sure would be awesome. I just know it'll be a long time until we see one, let alone one with decent compatibility or one that plays at an acceptable frame rate. On the other hand, I remember a time on this very site when people discussed whether or not it was even possible to emulate the Nintendo 64. Myself, I'm more interested in what emulators will run ON the PS3.

[belmont]

Hi Jay!!! Long time no see!

What you say is very interesting about emulators on PS3. It is too bad that there is no way to hack a PS3 for this kind of work. There is a way to make in run Linux but it does not work well.

[Jay]

Yeah, it's been a while. I'm happy to find so many regulars still around. I see we have so new ones as well. I made a new site about emulation which got me thinking about this place.

Yes, it is too bad that no hack yet exists. I bet Sony is thrilled, but it's only a matter of time. Then the emulator ports will food in. Until then, I'll have to be content with emulation on my PS2 (which is fine really).

I just think that looking forward to emulating on the PS3 is more realistic than PS3 on any x86 platform. Besides we need to support the current consoles. A least a little anyway.

[huze5]

What are you saying? a PS3 emulator? haha that's funny ,it has a Cell Broadband Processor

Has a whopping 8 cores that run at 3.2GHZ each

6 are for games
1 for security
one is not used.
3 times more powerful than XBOX360
Can you imagine a PC that will emulate it well right now???

The Apple Mac Pro has 8 cores. So has the Intel V8.

[Fredsas1]

The PC has more than enough power to emulate a PS3. I was thinking using CUDA, aka the (nVidia) GPU to perform all the calculations. I was looking at the PS3 specs, and they said the PS3 is capable of about 230 something or less Giga-flops with all 8 of its cores in use (This is in theory, its max power, keeping in mind that normally, no game uses more than 2 of its cores ANYWAY....)

My 8800GT 512MB is capable of about 500 Giga-flops alone, making it over twice as fast as a PS3. (A GTX 200 class is capable of over a Tera-Flop) And that's just the graphics card. If these devs were articulate and skilled enough to code efficiently then the PC would have no problems at all. (Not to undermine their skills, but lets face it, if these guys were getting paid to do this, then the dedication and hence programming would be right to the max in a heart beat)

[StreamCyper]

If your gonna make an Emulator for PS3 now, you need to make the Emulator run as OS and you need a good and fast Software. A upper class gamer PC powerful enough to pass the PS3. it's just that wen your running it through an other OS is gets slowed down, and it the PC has to use lots of it's memory and CUP on an OS you don't even use.

If your planing to run it through windows, Linux etc. your gonna haft to wait for a while.

[FatTrucker]

You're all still overlooking the fact that you're talking about emulation. Comparing specs of the host and emulating machine is a pointless exercise. Its far more to do with actual architecture, running a hardware function in software is a far more intensive and complicated task.

Again, build a PC that's capable of emulating a high end graphics card (without actually having a graphics card) and you're getting closer to a reasonable example.

If you think a multi-cored processor could run a high end PC game by emulating the functions of a graphics card, you would be wrong, which is precisely the reason its currently a no no for the PS3, its just too data intensive.

Bear in mind also that emulators cannot use proprietary functions due to copyright infringement, so they have to be reverse engineered then emulated in software using completely different methods than the host machine uses, its a massively complicated task.

For anyone that thinks its just because the programmers are lazy or crap, they obviously haven't actually tried to do it themselves.

For the record the OS has relatively nothing to do with the machines ability to emulate in terms of the resources it uses.

[TyZeR]

It's better to just go and buy the PS3 lol!

[StreamCyper]

You're all still overlooking the fact that you're talking about emulation. Comparing specs of the host and emulating machine is a pointless exercise. Its far more to do with actual architecture, running a hardware function in software is a far more intensive and complicated task.

Again, build a PC that's capable of emulating a high end graphics card (without actually having a graphics card) and you're getting closer to a reasonable example.

If you think a multi-cored processor could run a high end PC game by emulating the functions of a graphics card, you would be wrong, which is precisely the reason its currently a no no for the PS3, its just too data intensive.

Bear in mind also that emulators cannot use proprietary functions due to copyright infringement, so they have to be reverse engineered then emulated in software using completely different methods than the host machine uses, its a massively complicated task.

For anyone that thinks its just because the programmers are lazy or crap, they obviously haven't actually tried to do it themselves.

For the record the OS has relatively nothing to do with the machines ability to emulate in terms of the resources it uses.

I'm not saying it's easy to make the emulator, or anything like that but saying that a PC's hardware isn't good enough isn't right becuz the ps3 is starting to get "old" and they don't update the hardware in it. PC hardware doesn't stop coming. it's all in the software now.

the PS3 run a doesn't run with a normal CPU, the CPU in the PS3 is almost the same as a GPU, and it's made to do mainly 1 thing: Graphic. Then if you try running something like that on a PC you'll need a GPU that's as powerful as the PS3, or you can run it with useing both CPU and GPU working together then you'll have the same speed and power as the PS3

and running the emulator through the OS DOES slow it down. There is a reason why programs runs faster on XP than they do at vista. that is becuz everything is controlled by the OS. so a slow and heavy OS makes it harder to run heavy programs. And when you use an emulator you basically just run an other virtual computer on your PC and the virtual computer is able to decode and proses ps2 data if it's a ps2 emulator

The PC is the what all the consoles are based on. the fore every console can be run on the PC system it's just a mater of how much effort you wanna put into it. work hard enough and you can basically run everything on the computer. consoles are just a cheep imitation of the PC made only for gaming, and of course that gives them the advantage they only need to focus on the gameing. but I'd say that in a 2-3 years no one uses the consoles they just use PCs for everything

[FatTrucker]

Lol, people have been saying that for the last 15 years!. PC's won't replace consoles, quite the opposite is true if you look at the last couple of generations, everything is being geared towards multi-functionality and delivering full multi-media via one under the TV system. Now that big screen HD is here, its probably not too much of a stretch to see a time when the PC goes back to being the workhorse and consoles cover everything else. Demographically its a tiny number of people who actually want to have a machine that needs regular upgrades to stay current......I've been a PC gamer for years but you can't deny the logic, Consumers don't like it, developers don't like it, and retailers don't like it, with a console that has a life span of 5 to 10 years there's much more profit in software and peripherals than there is on the PC and money and accessibility always win the day.

You're completely overlooking the whole reverse engineered thing then?. As I said, like for like grunt isn't the main thing where emulation is concerned, its far more intensive for a PC to emulate what a PS3 does than it is to actually do what a PS3 does - they aren't the same thing...at all.

If someone simply adapted PS3 code to run on a PC CPU and GPU Sony would sue them straight off the planet.....you just can't do it that way.