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RPCS3 Is A New PS3 Emulator, Still In Early Stage, Boots Commercial Game
- Thread starter Poetic.Injustice
- Start date
R10Neymarfan
Member
So it will come down to Mantle and the new versions of DX12 and OpenGL that help the utilization of CPU/GPU?
yeah, we're only onto what? the 7th 8th year of the console?
Really? My buddy and I ran one and played Smash Bros at work against each other and it ran flawless. It was only one game though, but I assumed that it was on the up and up because N64 was so long ago and the emus before it were perfect.
I still run Chrono Trigger time and again on the SNES emu, fuck now I want to do that
Sectorseven
Member
Entirely false. They are turing complete and can do everything. The DMA-gated main memory access is the only thing that makes them different from any other "real" CPU core.
Mapping SPU code to GPGPU is not going to work.
Throwing some money at it might make things move along a bit faster, but without proper documentation there could easily be unforeseen obstacles that will stall development regardless of monetary factors.
As some people have stated here anyway, SPU code on GPU might be infeasible for a variety of reasons, but I was led to believe OpenCL, CUDA and the like are Turing complete. Is this false?
Dictator93
Member
Wow, this is quite the progress. Very impressive work from the dev team! I look forward to seeing Killzone 2 rendered correctly but at 1 fps. Seriously would not even care that it is 1 fps.
There's been some progress with this if anybody is interested, they're now able to get in-game with Disgaea 3 albeit extremely buggy and slow.
InfiniteNine
Rolling Girl
It's stupidly slow with lots of glitching but it's progress!
It would surprise me if this generation of consoles is ever successfully emulated. It's not just that the hardware is higher performance, it's that it's orders of magnitude more complex than prior consoles. Due to anti-piracy and the higher stakes/cost involved with console development now, security is also substantially higher. So I imagine that the kind of low-level hardware documentation that would be instrumental to properly understanding the system architecture well enough for emulation is well guarded and won't be leaking out any time soon.
Perhaps there's some future in high-level solutions involving wrappers/cross compilations/kernel hijacking and API intercepts. If I remember correctly, caustik was leaning toward this route and looking into .xbe to .exe conversion for Xbox emulation before he abandoned the project.
So while there may be some options way down the line that allow for running of modern console games on PC, I think true low-level game console emulation is pretty much over.
Perhaps there's some future in high-level solutions involving wrappers/cross compilations/kernel hijacking and API intercepts. If I remember correctly, caustik was leaning toward this route and looking into .xbe to .exe conversion for Xbox emulation before he abandoned the project.
So while there may be some options way down the line that allow for running of modern console games on PC, I think true low-level game console emulation is pretty much over.
Sir_Crocodile
Member
Wasn't the PS3's security totally compromised a few years back? I think the toughest thing to work out will be getting the rather exotic CPU working at anything close to playable frame rates, unless the SPE units lend themselves well to each being taken by x86 cores without tons of latency.
Anyway, hopefully this will lead to me being able to play the definitive Tales of Vesperia in english in a few years.
Of course, Bamco could release Tales of Vesperia HFGBRVBS edition before then
Anyway, hopefully this will lead to me being able to play the definitive Tales of Vesperia in english in a few years.
Of course, Bamco could release Tales of Vesperia HFGBRVBS edition before then
The actual system security has been fairly compromised on 360 and PS3 and actually shouldn't be a huge hurdle to emulation.
I was speaking more toward company internal security. MS and Sony take that type of thing a lot more seriously now, so I wouldn't expect white papers detailing low level hardware specifications, system calls, GPU and CPU features and instruction sets, etc. to leak out. And given the complexity of these systems, I think you'd really need those things to be able to do low level emulation of them.
Regarding the original Xbox, even Microsoft had trouble with that. The Xbox 360 had to use per-title compatibility profiles and still ran into all sorts of problems emulating Xbox games. This from a company that had a team assigned to just that task and presumably had the original Xbox hardware engineers available to assist and the documentation to match. That said, I suspect the team responsible for the backwards compatibility emu was both rushed and small (especially seeing how quickly they stopped providing updates or support for it).
Sir_Crocodile
Member
I'd imagine there should be papers floating around for CELL - sony, IBM & toshi were pushing that chip pretty heavily for a few years. Wouldn't decapping remain a possible (while difficult) option too?
Euro version of Panzer Dragoon Orta freezes after stage one. The ONLY game I cared about too. To rub salt into the wound, the US version apparently runs fine. :/
ResidentDante
Member
I played past Stage 1 recently. PAL version.
I'm sure there's some information for Cell floating around (there's even docs and code samples for the RSX, the PS3 GPU). The problem would be with PS3-specific implementation of Cell. Referencing the original Xbox again, that system uses what is essentially a Pentium 3. Hell, you can even do a CPU swap into the original Xbox with an off the shelf CPU. But there's specifics with how the console handles and addresses various things that makes everything that much more complicated. Decapping a chip can provide some useful info, but it's also a complicated, time consuming, and expensive process.
Then you've got the BIOS, scaler chips, hypervisor, audio processors, etc. to deal with still. I really just think it's too much. Maybe if you had a team of people working full time on a project it might be feasible. But it's not like the past where it was feasible for one or two very dedicated people to do as a personal project.
Oh, and for Panzer Dragoon there's a workaround for the PAL version that involves unlocking the level select menu so you can skip past the crash point.
Since Sony, IBM and Toshiba were pushing it to be used as a general purpose CPU and Sony allowed Linux to be installed on the PS3 with full access to the Cell, it's extremely well documented. The only parts of it that weren't covered were handled when the system got hacked. IBM even had a software emulator for the Cell anyone could download for free (no source though, runs slow).
The RSX is more difficult, but still doable. Back in the early days of Linux someone discovered a bug in the hypervisor that allowed them to access the GPU directly. Within a month or so most of the RSX's major functions had been discovered. Since then, there's been multiple SDK leaks as well as a lot of people hacking away on systems with CFW and full access to the GPU.
That said, it's still a really complicated system that's going to take a while to get running solidly, and a lot longer to get running at a decent speed.
Relaxed Muscle
Member
See guys!
Red Dead Redemption is coming to PC after all!
Red Dead Redemption is coming to PC after all!
Sir_Crocodile
Member
Yeah, just double checked, it's stage 3.
I don't think it ever really was. It's taken byuu 10 years of crazily amazing dedication, on top of the initial work done by others, and the help he got from others in the community and far cheaper then usual decapping. At least optical disc games don't have any custom chip surprises. I think one of the shogi games had a chip that in some ways was more powerful then the snes...
That said, there were a lot of people who thought that no ps3 emulator would ever do anything with commercial games, and we're there now so who knows.
Yeah, not really the same feel though. :/ Hopefully sega will rerelease the game someday...unless they've lost the source code again.
Crazy. Seems like its just a matter of needing the manpower and machine power in order to get the PS3 emulated.
paperspace
Member
My Pentium 4 is ready!
Black Door
Banned
Can't wait to enjoy this in 2025
Thats really interesting, guess it wont take as long as we might think.
* claps furiously *
gigantor21
Member
That framerate, though...
I remember following development of his OG Xbox emulator for a while. Back then, I always assumed that the issue was more software-related (DirectX) than anything else.
efyu_lemonardo
May I have a cookie?
I would just like to point out that Disgaea 3 started life as a PS2 game and near the end of development was quickly ported to PS3. Chances are it uses nearly zero PS3 specific CPU/GPU functions and is likely running off of known PS2 emulated architecture with some modifications for resolution. I'd hardly call this a PS3 emulator, it's a lot like the very early Xbox 1 emulator that only ran Halo because the console was essentially a PC and they probably got lucky with finding some devkit "emulation"...Now look where Xbox 1 emulation is nowadays.
The upsampling, the AA, it'll be beautiful. ;_;
Graphics Horse
Member
You think they're emulating a ps2 game disguised as a PS3 game using a ps2 emulator disguised as a ps3 emulator?
Truespeed
Member
Not much more than a advanced shader? Please, they deserve more credit than that. They're more like specialized 3 GHz cores with their own MMU and storage. And while they may not be 'true' general purpose CPU cores they do run all of the systems in games while the PPU is relegated to a job scheduler.
lightchris
Member
That's not how it works. Disgaea 3 is a very simple looking game that most likely runs solely on Cell's PPU and doesn't use any other than the most basic GPU functions (no shaders). That is what it makes easier to emulate. But it's still 100% PS3 binary code, otherwise it wouldn't run on PS3. And since PS3 shares no resemblance to PS2 at all, there is no way they would profit from knowing how the game would be if it were on PS2.
Poetic.Injustice
Member
KojiKnight
Member
The progress on this emu has been pretty great all things considered. I wouldn't have expected anything to be running for another couple years.
As for people complaining about speed... I don't even think they have a dynarec up and running for it yet. And I wouldn't expect them too till they have a reasonable compatible interpreter working.
That said, even then we're looking at maybe 10x the performance (so instead of 1.5 fps, something like 15fps). Machines won't be running commercial PS3 games at full speed for many many years.
JohnnyFootball
GerAlt-Right. Ciriously.
I don't believe for one second that this will work reliably or even remotely close to it.
I'd live to play the resistance games on PC though.
I'd live to play the resistance games on PC though.
Reallllllly hoping this proves to be fruitful like Dolphin, PCSX2, PPSSPP, and all of the various other emulators have for the community. It's not just getting games in better visual quality; this opens the door for fan translations much more than what's available with hacked PS3s.
I suppose it's just going to take many years for that to be as accessible and easy.
I suppose it's just going to take many years for that to be as accessible and easy.