PS3 Emulator?

Is there a working one of these out right now?

I've got a PS3 and a bunch of PS3 games, but it's currently in storage and even when it's not I never seem to play it. I'm so used to multi-tasking while playing computer games that I just can't sit down in front of the TV and only dedicate myself to playing my PS3, plus I'm always on the go, so that doesn't help much.

 

No, there isn't a working emulator yet. I don't think there is even a prototype.

 

Yep, nada right now and good luck emulation a cell processor, crazy architecture, good luck with backwards compatibility for the PS4 Sony . It will likely be done at some point, but it's going to take quite a while.

EDIT: HTWingNut makes another good point, just think of the power required to emulate a PS2 or a Wii compared to the processing power of the actual console.

 

I don't think PC power is even near the ability to emulate PS3 yet.

 

Ah darn. I've recently discovered the Star Ocean series (one of my friends down here loaned me his PS1 discs) and found it amazing. I've already got the PS2 Star Ocean game being shipped to me, and was hoping I could play the PS3 one eventually as well.

I guess I'll have to wait on that one though. It's unfortunate that they don't make a PC port/version avaliable for most console games out there.

 

Star Ocean IV isn't a bad game, but it isn't as good as the previous titles thanks to a few incredibly annoying characters and bad bad english voice acting (the PS3 version has the japanese voices available, but on 360 it was one hell of a nightmare + disc swapping ugh!). The only JRPG in recent years where i could stand most of the cast was Tales of Vesperia. Don't get me started on Snow in FF XIII...

In any case, you'll miss on a decent and enjoyable game, but you won't be missing a great game. If you want to play it, taking the time to play on PS3 is the only solution and i have to say, the battle system is an absolute blast and the main reason i actually enjoyed the game.

 

I believe they're planning on using the cell again in the PS4, there's no hard facts on anything right now but it does make sense given that they still haven't really managed to make full use of of what it can do yet.

Also, PS2's are difficult to emulate because of the way they work, if it weren't for the fact that it has multiple processors, each with different functions running at different clock speeds then it wouldn't be so hard.

 

Maybe in 5 years or so. I'm not sure if ps2 emulation is even 100% yet.

 

The PS2 does quite a few specialized processors. It's sort of a mess to emulate. The PS3 is similarly a mess- since the CPU is really potent at doing a few specific things. It's not like you couldn't get PS3 games to run on a modern computer with some development level effort, but emulating the processor is probably still outside the realm of possibility.

The PS3 shares some CPU functionality with some GPU functionality. I'm sure you would have plenty of compute power with a modern CPU and a modern GPU, but you'd have to use OpenCL to even think about doing that sort of emulation, and in all likelihood, I doubt OpenCL is flexible enough to *emulate* that type of system.

Their best bet for the PS4 retaining backwards compatibility would be to put a cell-compatible processor in the PS4. Add more cores. There's currently one general core and 6 or so specialized ones.

They already have all the internal documentation of exactly how their system works. They should be able to emulate the PSX and PS2 without trouble on the PS3+.

 

was only recently that the sega saturn had a "working" emulator (SSF), even that's not 100% due to it's multi-processor setup making it notoriously difficult to emulate

wii emulation's been pretty top-notch for a couple of years but you still need a system which is likely 10x the power of the actual console itself in order to run the thing

 

Haha, I thought Hope was the most obnoxious character in all of the FF series combined. Snow wasn't nearly as bad IMO, but still not a likeable character, however, I was a huge fan of lightning.

You're right about the battle system though. Even on the dated Star Ocean II it's really fun, probably one of the most entertaining JRPG battle systems I've ever played.

Also, I haven't had much trouble getting my PS2 emulator to work.

 

PS2 emulation works fine now. Hope used to bug me big time, but he manned up at some point and didn't annoy me as much. hope was a cry baby and snow, well stop saying you're the hero and actually do something about the crap going on... Vanille's voice acting also got somewhat on my nerve. I still enjoyed the game, but i stopped at one playthrough.

Wait till you meet edge in Star Ocean TLH, when he gets in his emo phase he's the most obnoxious JRPG character i've ever met. It's only for a portion of the game though so it isn't too bad. If you have a 360, definitely get Tales of Vesperia, it's the only JRPG where stereotypical characters came as either harmless or funny as far as i'm concerned. The combat system in ToV is fun too, but it can be broken to breeze through the game with the right spells/skills/items. Imagine a skill that makes support spells last for the whole fight and a support spell that negates all damage. Combine both and even the hardest of bosses are completely harmless, way to break the game . Add a mage with insane dps on aoe spells and you have a party...

 

Emulating a 360 looks much more likely. It uses directX for a start which makes life easy. It's also more similar to normal PC's than a PS3 which put you leaps and bounds ahead.

What I think would be a good thing to try and do is make it port over the game code needed for the engine and the level in question when in loading screens using openCL. You could multithread the crap out of that so it shouldn't be much of a problem. This might require a specific config-setting-file-thing for each game though to add support for it, if only to recognise the loading screens. Since 360's are programmed in C# that should also make things little simpler. The amount of floating point calculation could be a problem, but if the code were ported to openCL (ironic that an openCL app would be porting something else to openCL?) then you would be able to compute those all on GPU which could crunch through fairly easily. Since openCL gives you opetions about whether or not to use the graphics or CPU (unlike CUDA where it "decides" for you), it would be easy enough to run the rest of the code on CPU. Since the Xenos CPU has multiple FPU's per core, I think it might be best to simply set aside 12 or so stream processors and dedicate them to float calculations.

I realise this is all overly simplified and that it would take years of development, but it's the best way I can see of going about it. Trying to do it old school and interpret it all on the fly like PCSX2 or other emulators would simply kill even the most godly PC in existance unless you found some nifty little shortcuts.

 

Two duct taped GameCubes?
Kinda sound true when a GameCube Emulator gets Wii support.

Anyways dont expect a basic PS3 emulator in at least 5 to 10 years.
And even then i doubt a notebook got the nessesary power to do it.
Kinda wondering how fast the desktops will be in 10 years myself.

 

5 to 10 years is vastly exaggerated, 10 years ago the best we got was pentium III, code name coppermine, compare to what we have today, it's utterly useless piece of silicon crap. Imagine what technology will advance in the next 10 years.

PS2 emulator has been there around before sony officially launched PS3, despite it was incredibly demanding and buggy then, it WAS there. Can't say how much sooner will we ever see a ps3 emulator, but it seems to me that we should be seeing some basic form of ps3 emulation a lot earlier than in 5 to 10 years.

 

there are also software issues. as the hardware gets more and more complex, emulating it in software becomes more and more of a challenge. even if hardware advances enough to be able to meet the demands, it will still take more time for software to get there.

development on pcsx2 started about a year after ps2 was released. It took about 4 years before they really had anything working decently. It's took basically another 5-6 years before most games worked with it. Looking at a 10 year development cycle. pcsx2 still isn't optimized for the latest hardware (4,6,8 cores) - it runs on 2006 era dual core hardware. The last 5 years worth of hardware advances haven't been necessary for pcsx2, but it took 10 years of development to get it to work well.

PCSX3 (or whatever) is going to take AT LEAST 10 years of development before it really gets anywhere, and no one has started yet.

 

I didn't say it will be a lot shorter than 5-10 years to MATURE a ps3 emulator to the level of ps2 emulation today, I just said we will see some form of ps3 emulation a lot earlier than some people may think.

 

Actually, the Wii is more of a gamecube 1.5 than a gamecube 2.0, kinda sad...

 

I know this question has probably been asked before, but I don't know the answer:

If computers are so much more powerful than consoles, then why do we need ridiculous hardware requirements just to run an emulator?

Mr. Mysterious

 

Consoles tend to have very different CPU architecture than any PC. Look at the PS3's Cell processor; there's nothing quite like it in any Intel or AMD computer CPU. Developers have a hard enough time writing games to use it, now imagine trying to get those games to become compatible with a completely alien set of CPU and graphics hardware that they were never meant to use in the first place.

 

because we are emulating both the hardware and the software on our gear. emulating semi current hardware is extremely hard to do as you can wind up having your cpu trying to pretend to be a completely different architecture.

for every clock cycle on a native piece of gear you could be running between 100 and 10,000 trying to emulate it.

 

Is is because in essence you have to emulate the architecture of the CPU/GPU architecture of the console in real time and that is what is actually eating up all those resources. The Xbox 360 and PS3 CPUs are Power PC based if i recall correctly and the PS3's cell processor is kind of an oddity. It was indeed a powerhouse at the time it was design, but with a crazy architecture: one all purpose core and 8 SPEs (i think one is deactivated on the PS3 and another is reserved for the OS) that excel at some types of calculations, but aren't so good for others.

 

There's a huge difference between trying to make a game run on a different platform by making changes to the game source code (relatively easy, no specific power requirements, similar to original platform would be fine) vs. trying to make a game run on a different platform by painstakingly recreating the ps3 hardware precisely, and running the original game on that in software.

Here's an analogy.

On the one hand, you have a honda accord. Let's say it costs 20,000$. It can drive on the roads just fine, and it's mostly good. Now, you have a BMW. By all performance measures, they can make a better car. Now, you task BMW with taking one of their already-completed sedan's (already out of the factory) and fiddling with all of it's handling characteristics to precisely match the honda accord. The way the car brakes, turns, tilts, accelerates, everything, has to match the honda accord EXACTLY, without any reference material or honda parts. It would be extremely difficult to do that. It would be much easier to make something flat-out better than to try to recreate the other car.

Here's a description of the actual scenario that may make sense:

The PS3 is using an extremely specialized CPU. It's sort of halfway between a CPU and GPU. It can do certain operations extremely quickly, even for modern CPU's. For general applications, like games, there is a lot to do, so not every operation is going to be one of those specialized operations. However, to emulate (imitate) the PS3, we have to write software that can do those specialized operations quickly, because game developers are going to build their games with those optimizations in mind, to get performance up to something reasonable (30-60 frames per second, depending on the game).

It's not like we couldn't write the same game to take advantage of other types of performance benefits you can get on the PC, and the PC is faster in general, but we have to imitate the way the PS3 does things to emulate that platform on ours. One of the big issues is that the PS3 processor has very large single precision floating point performance under certain circumstances. It's faster than even a core i7 IIRC. That's how they are able to make real time h.264 encoders run on the PS3. We can do similar things on the PC using our GPU and leveraging OpenCL to get really high performance encoding. On the whole, using our CPU and OpenCL on the GPU would be better computationally than anything the PS3 could do (especially if you have a high end GPU like an AMD 5800/6800+, or Nvidia equivalent). However, there are other little optimizations that PS3 has that don't make it better than a PC, but do make it difficult to recreate precisely on a PC. An example is the fact that the SPE (GPU-like) cores on the PS3's cell CPU have a very fast connection to the PPE (CPU-like part). Our connection speed between GPU and CPU is more limited. We can work with that limitation if we're designing software, but we can't if we're emulating a PS3. We have to wait for CPU technology to change or get fast enough, or for the bus between the CPU and GPU to fast enough to handle all the graphics operations on the GPU + part or all of the SPE processing.

This is why we have cross-platform games that look amazing and run better on the PC than they do on the PS3 or xbox, but no PS3 emulator.

TL;DR- it's like trying to fit the square in the circle hole.

 

Nice description of the problem with emulating the PS3, on the other hand it did allow for some quite visually impressive titles (for a console) like Uncharted 2. Doesn't the PS3 uses crazy fast RAM as well, though the bus might be operating at standard PC speeds.

 

The "general purpose" core is extremely similar to the one used as the base unit for the xbox360's triple core (it has SMT - two threads per core, SPARC arch, etc), however, it is used as an onchip controller unit in the PS3's implementation of "Cell," and not accessible to the system itself. Sort of like early Tegra chips from nVidia having an ARM7 (not to be confused with ARMv7 ISA) core to act as the chip "controller," controlling an ARM11 core + GeForce ULP (along other cores, like ISP and video decode ASIC). But the rest is generally accurate.

It was vs DDR2, but since high clocked, low CAS DDR3 and GDDR5 is now out, the XDR on the PS3 is quite dated (though not useless).







For the one person who mentions the xbox360 being easier to emulate... the xbox360 is a SPARC arch CPU, + a few HW functions that are similar, but in reverse, to nVidia Optimus Fast Copy. In addition, the Direct3D (not even going to mention the entire DirectX variant in use on the x360) utilized on the xbox360 is a superset, and not a subset of DirectX 9 (a-c/1-3), beyond that, it also has (this part is rumor, those who paid for, and were approved for, the dev kit will know for sure) a lot of direct machine API/ISA level access to the xbox360 GPU (which also acts as the northbridge, though that's a minor detail today - except for the fast copy engine...).

 

PCSX3 is an ongoing project. Last I checked it had like... 5 revisions lol and it might already be dead.

Don't expect anything for another 5 years imo