Emulators? PS3?

What exactly is required to run a PS2 emulator at the moment?
Are PS3 emulators possible at the moment if you get a blu-ray disc drive by any chance?

 

I don't think there's been great success in coding a PS3 emulator yet, largely because of the Cell, but also because it's hugely difficult to do for next-gen consoles.
There aren't even fully stable PS2 emulators.

Oh, and just to keep things sweet here, you are aware you must legally own a copy of the game you intend to have a ROM of?

 

Gaming emulators are illegal so long as the console can be found easily in the retail market. So PS3 and PS2 emulators are currently illegal.

You aren't going to find one outside of the illegal piracy community.

 

Who determines whether its found "easily"? What makes it not illegal after that?

 

I'll have to find the reference, but Dailytech ran a story about a year or two ago. In short, the US Patent Office ruled that emulators were legal if you could not find the console on retail shelves or via used marketplaces.

 

So if you cannot find anymore PSone on Sale it is now a legal emulator??

 

But...
You can still find SNES and Genesis (Mega Drive to us UK folk) on eBay, but I was under the impression that the emulators themselves were completely legal, and the ROMs were too but only if you owned a hard copy of the game.

 

I am going have to disagree with you on this one Greg. There's an up going Legal PS2 Emulator project namely PCSX2 @ www.PCSX2.net, at least it should be legal otherwise it will be shut down in no time. They are legal because their staffs don't officially provide support for anyone asking to mod, to download, or to use pirated games, additionally, they require you to dump your own BIOS from your PS2. The whole moderator team watch the forum very carefully for any signs of piracy going on.

Performance wise, the PS2 Emulator isn't still worth it, it will take the top rig of today to pump out just Playable performance not even 60 fps that the developer were aiming at. Just so you have an idea, to even get some graphic intensive games such as "FFXII" to be enjoyable you need to have min Q6600 OC'ed to 3.2, and a 8800m GTS. The emulator itself is still very demanding at the moment, however, it works great if you are just playing some of the 2D games such as Disgaea 1/2, then the requirement is moderately lower. Also, the developers of PCSX2 are now only focusing on compatibility issues and not performance, thus, you probably won't see a worthwhile PS2 emulator for a while. My suggestion is just to pick up the PS2 for cheap at your local store.

Btw, you meant, that if you could find one then the US patent Office ruled it to be illegal right? Instead of Could Not?

 

Actually, of course I was going to buy the actual PS3 game first but I wanted to know if getting a Blu-Ray drive would also help with PS3 games emulators, but I guess the answers look pretty grim.

The machine I was intending this to run was the Alienware m15x with the 8800m GTX graphics card but even so I was worrying about it not being 'strong' enough to run such games.

 

Nah. If you're getting the notebook to run PS3 games, you're better off getting yourself a PS3.
Successful emulators are a long time off. The emulation community as a whole seems to be slowing down, simply because next-gen consoles are damn near impossible to code without requiring one hell of a system to run.

Play PC games. They're better.

 

I spent around 40-50 hours messing with Emulaters, just to get an idea of what people were talking about. Theres a ton of steps to take depending on how do it, my best method was.

First I downloaded Daemon Tools (an ISO Program) This tricks your computer to believe it has a CD. I would download an ISO (Image file) and mount it in Daemon tools.
Second (There are two ways, one with Registry and one manually) I disabled my normal CD Drive so the emulator didnt conflict with normal VS digital.
Third loading the PS2 Emulator and started tweaking settings, theres a TON of settings, and you'll hafta research those.
Lastly - Its hit or miss, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesnt - I managed to get FF12 working, but Cinematics were choppy and unstable.

After messing with it for 50 hours or so, i deleted the emulator and the ISO's, but now I've got an idea of how its done in certain worlds. Plus, it gave me knowledge on other applications and errors that can be solved with some of the stuff I learned.

 

ALL emulator are legal, but their bioses are not.
You can find even xbox/gamecube emulators but you'll have hard time searching bioses for them.

PS3 / X360 will be possible to emulate maybe in next 10 years +.

 

PS2 emulators are like 60% stable currently and not even worth the hassle required to get them working

N64/PSX emulators are quite fun though.

 

On my laptop (stats in sig) I got pcsx2 running with Final Fantasy X (yes, I dumped the bios from my PS2 and am using my own legally purchased copy of the game).

During cutscenes, it's pretty smooth but the video sometimes lags just a little behind the audio.

During gameplay, it's imperfect but playable for the most part, but there are rare graphical glitches, and during Ixions overdrive it chugs a bit (though not during the others).

The most noticeable problem is during in-engine cutscene type bits with lots of dialog, where if a character gives a long speech or rant, the video will start to lag behind the audio since I have it to play the audio in real time regardless of video lag to avoid choppiness. But it's not as bad as it seems, because it still cues the audio in timing with the video, so sound effects go off right and people start talking at the right times.

It has also froze/crashed very rarely, though it's easy enough to make it crash by trying to multi-task with other programs, it's easy enough to avoid doing that as well.

P.S. PCSX2 works off of a plugin based system, with a seperate plugin for everything from graphics, sound, and CPU emulation to port and drive emulation. This is nice because people can make their own plugins more easily, giving us more to choose from, but it also means a lot of tweaking on the users part to try and get it to run as best they can by using different plugins and different settings.

 

The code for ps2 currently isnt completely optimized by anyone(that i know of). So that being said, while the ps2 can be emulated, it cant run at the USA norm of 60fps. As far as legality issues, i believe dragon pet is correct; the bios must be dumped from the actual system. PS3 emulators are in my opinion a long way off.

 

Ya, the PS2 hardware is by no means high tech by todays standards, but it certainly is unique, which makes it very hard to emulate with a normal PC, especially when a perfect FPS is so important because say, in most games, if you drop from 60 to 54 FPS, you probably wont even notice, but with an emulated game it will actually play 10% slower, audio will become choppy or out of synch with the video, etc, even if visually it looks smooth and sleek.