Sectorseven
Member
What kind of background knowledge and education do you need to make something like this?
I assume it's more than knowing C++
I assume it's more than knowing C++
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RPCS3 Is A New PS3 Emulator, Still In Early Stage, Boots Commercial Game
- Thread starter Poetic.Injustice
- Start date
It will be really interesting to revisit this thread in 10+ years when the PS3 emulator is actually playable. It will be like a time capsule. How many grey names will there be? Will we be playing PS5 then? What's going to become of the video game industry? Will the current big three still exist and still be in the video game console business? Will Amazon be successful? By then we'll know. Interesting times ahead.
You forgot the "FIND OUT NEXT TIME ON DRAGON. BALL. Z!"
Poetic.Injustice
Member
spons
Gold Member
This is exciting news. If this takes off with some good developers on the team we'll be set in a couple of years without needing to scavenge the few physical consoles still in working order. Since that Netflix-like streaming thing will use actual PS3 hardware we won't see any quality improvements? This sounds like a better alternative as we can actually own the games either way.
Crimsonsky
Member
Wow, that is amazing. Go forth young fellows and know that you are doing God's work here on earth.
That was the original one. There is another one that just unlocks the framerate to 60fps.
Mauricio_Magus
Banned
I know that, I'm just saying when I'll be able to play it.
cheezcake
Member
Some decent knowledge of low level computer architecture (instruction set architectures, interrupt handling etc) and most importantly access to hardware documentation on the system you're trying to emulate.
Source: Wild guesses from an electrical engineering student
Canis lupus
Member
Dont expect this to run at half decent fps on your rig before 2020.
That said, can't wait to play Bayonetta, RDR with glorious visuals in the next decade.
That said, can't wait to play Bayonetta, RDR with glorious visuals in the next decade.
I do understand very well what an achievement it is to get a ps3 game to actually boot up like this .
I was commenting on the low frame rate on the display and Dario already clarified that it is only running on a interpreter above .
Saintguine
Member
Not a programmer but probably
- Having sufficient documentation about what you're emulating
- Knowledge about how the hardware of the console works
- Knowledge about the software that the console runs
Sort of unrelated but also related is blueshogun96's (creator of some of the only Xbox emulators) post on Xbox emulation
blueshogun96 said:
StoppedInTracks
Member
Disgaea 3:
This is crazy. And brings back so many memories of first DC, N64 and PS2 emulators only launching title screens of some shitty 2D games at 5 fps. The rest is history.
It has begun and wow I cannot wait to replatinum Demon's Souls in full HD with anti-aliasing and nVidia's 3D.
Can you imagine TLOU in 1920x1080? It will happen sooner or later. The baseline - a working PS3 emulator, even if slow like shit - is finally there.
Basileus777
Member
Being made from "off the shelf parts" isn't as meaningful as you'd think. And X86 doesn't turn emulation into some easy task. See the original Xbox.
polyh3dron
Banned
There no way the PS3 will ever get emulated properly at full speed
Emulation, at its core, is remarkably simple to do once you know how to write programs (if you are interested, Google CHIP-8 emulation tutorial).
However, it's not really the emulation that is difficult to do when writing an emulator; It's understanding a given architecture to the point where you know intimate details about it even the developers have forgotten (or even never knew!). This was fairly simple in the days where processors had a handful of instructions to emulate, but these days there could be as many as 20 different instructions dedicated to adding two registers together (and these are only the trivial problems). Documentation helps greatly in that regard, but the level of documentation needed is rarely the level of documentation provided, so you often have to rely on prior knowledge to get the work done.
Sentenza
Member
Thanks for this exceptionally competent insight.
Suikoguy
I whinny my fervor lowly, for his length is not as great as those of the Hylian war stallions
I have a feeling the new consoles will require some serious programming wizardry to be properly emulated since computer technology has stopped moving vertically, and instead has progressed horizontally with more processors (cores) instead of faster processors.
Pending Quantum computers yielding far faster single threads, it's likely emulation of newer hardware will hit a wall.
polyh3dron
Banned
The Cell is such an alien CPU and has so many cores in it that I don't see how it can be properly emulated on a traditional PC even with a quad core CPU. Some games that don't utilize all the cores properly may get emulated easier, but then there are ones like God of War 3 that don't have a chance in hell.
Not anytime soon sure, but your post is the kind of post people from the future look back at and laugh.
polyh3dron
Banned
Unified RAM pool on PS4 tells me no, so does sophisticated RAM setup in the XBOne.
Lend me your crystal ball.
OT: Can't wait to see how the emulator will have progressed in 5-10 years.
Sentenza
Member
I'll be honest, this to me reads more or less: "I heard things on the internet and I'm going to repeat them to make it sound like I know what I'm talking about".
cheezcake
Member
I think it's time to stop dude...
quantumnerd
Member
On top of what the other guys have noted, I'd note that emulation requires at the very least basic knowledge of how chips operate, how compilers work, multithreaded computing, driver/OS architecture, etc, since you have to know about the tools you're reproducing. For example, if you have to make a console graphics library work, you may have to rewrite it-- then the API spelunking begins. And emulation requires even more spelunking because a lot of games run on dangerous, shaky code held together by the consistency of the consoles' locked clockspeeds and the only-one-target thing. Not only do you have to reproduce the architecture's main features, not only do you have to reproduce the weird ones, you also have to reproduce the bugs, and even the timings (!!!). Can't have function calls returning in a different order than they did on the retail hardware, hmm?
Basileus777
Member
Why are you talking about quad core CPUs as a justification for "never?" One day someone will be playing God of War 3 running on a quantum computer and laughing at this post.
cyberheater
PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 PS4 Xbone PS4 PS4
Very impressive that they can get any game to boot. Even if it is at 3-5 frames per second.
Optimisations come later. I do wonder what kind of a monster PC you'll need to get a Uncharted game to run at 60fps at 1080p.
Optimisations come later. I do wonder what kind of a monster PC you'll need to get a Uncharted game to run at 60fps at 1080p.
Sentenza
Member
One day someone will be playing God of War 3 running on his wristwatch, which is why long term predictions like "never" are always laughable.
Put me in the camp that thinks it's a bit sad that PS3 emulation has gotten farther than the og xbox. I have already seen the explanation why it's hard to emulate xbox games, doesn't make it less sad. Otogi and Otogi 2 look pretty cool to play, but you can't play them on the x360 and buying an xbox seems like overkill.
lightchris
Member
Farther? No. Cxbx or Dxbx boot some commercial games too.
UnluckyKate
Member
Cant wait to play uncharted at 4k
Oh didn't know that.
I'm not a programmer either but the reasons about why its not easy to emulate the OG Xbox are a bit confusing. For one thing, he talks about emulating an x86 processor. Why would it need to be emulated when you are running on an x86 processor? Couldn't the emulator be created as a sort of hybrid that utilizes the PCs hardware for some things and just emulates other parts of the Xbox?
Sentenza
Member
Yeah, his arguments never convinced me too much, either, for the same reasons.
"Emulating a x86 on a x86 is hard".
Well, but you are not supposed to. At least theoretically, some sort of wrapper capable of intercepting/translating instructions should be enough.
Of course, there still is the problem of the lack of documentation (and arguably of interest), but that's a very different issue.
StoppedInTracks
Member
Fools said the same thing about PS2 emulation.
That kind of CPU/ GPU probably doesn't exist yet. 30fps@720p should be doable on some monster octo rigs with SLI Titans after final version of the emu is released.
Actually, I'm not so sure about this. An eight core CPU is necessary in my opinion since you would generally want to outsource SPU code execution to individual cores (or on the GPU perhaps?), but the main workhorse core on the Cell will require a massive amount of sequential power that adding more cores to the mix will never make up for. As for the graphics side of things, it depends on how well libGCM code lends itself high-level emulation concepts.
KojiKnight
Member
The Cell only has 1 "core" and the 8 (really 7 since one is disabled to improve yields) SPEs are not much more advanced than shaders on a graphics card. They are great at parallel simple tasks, they are not designed and can't run as true CPU cores.
It'll be a few years yet before CPUs and the actual emulator are in a state that can run these things, but it'll definitely happen.
This is definitely the biggest hurdle.
only written a 6502 emulator in pascal many many years ago, but I guess if you have the ability to execute own programs on a PS3 (or xbox og) you can understand how things work easier.
reverse engineer some code, make som alternations and see the behaviour. I did this once on the Amiga when a developer didnt want to give me the specifics about a library
reverse engineer some code, make som alternations and see the behaviour. I did this once on the Amiga when a developer didnt want to give me the specifics about a library
People said exactly the same about the PS2 and its emulator PCSX2.
They've already got title screens up and running. I don't doubt within 10 years this thing will be running fantastically, and even at resolutions higher than 1080p (as PCSX2 supports nowadays).
Suikoguy
I whinny my fervor lowly, for his length is not as great as those of the Hylian war stallions
SSF is pretty good, it just has no graphical improvements.
DarkLordMalik
Member
May i ask how long it took for the PS2 to be emulated. This is impressive for sure but kinda hard to imagine getting completed within the next few years.
Kudos to the people who work on emulators though. I'd call them programming geniuses, as it requires a lot of efforts and reverse engineering to make these emulators.
Kudos to the people who work on emulators though. I'd call them programming geniuses, as it requires a lot of efforts and reverse engineering to make these emulators.
The SPUs are an interesting challenge. Shoving SPU code execution over to individual CPU cores under-utilize that core so DirectCompute/OpenCL might be an attractive option.
KojiKnight
Member
PCSX2 is 12 years old in 2 weeks (March 23rd) if you go by the date of the first publically released version. It was actually in production for a year before anything was released so you could say 13 years from today.
The first version considered "playable" would probably have been version 0.9.1. This introduced a much faster recompiler and was at a time when quite a few games were playable (I believe FFX was playable at this point, though with graphic errors).
0.9.1 was released in July '06... so 3-4 years or so after PCSX2 first started working with the PS2 bios (which is probably about on par with what the PS3 emu is currently at)
The only problem I can foresee is that individual shaders aren't very fast on GPU hardware (PC's preferring slower but more of them approach), and I'm not sure if individual SPE work could be successfully split... I'm kind of doubtful on that. It may end up being that a super fast CPU with an SPE emulated per core will be necessary...
It'll likely probably be very dependent on individual games and their tolerance on timings and how well optimized the SPE code work can be done.
Such an in-between architecture... Interesting times ahead.