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https://pcsx2.net/ is a Playstation 2 emulator in case you've been living under a mac.

MotionInJoy

Dear god no. MotionInJoy is the insufferable ball of crap I dealt with before the driver here:
http://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread...

Was available.

Motionjoy bad! Scarlett Crush Productions DS3 driver is where it's at! Even supports up to 4 controllers!

There's various solutions already for getting the DS3 to work under LInux

PS2 emulation in PCSX2 was pretty stable for a long time now (Total Games: 2420 Playable: 1946 (80.41%)) and works reasonably fast on 5 year old PC.

Now XB360 and PS3 are tall order, what with the need to emulate custom PowerPC and Cell chips clocked as fast as any modern PC CPU.

XBOne and PS4 are easy compared to those - they've got run-of-the-mill x86 CPUs (easy to virtualise) with run-of-the-mill GPUs, in case of XBOne even with run-of-the-mill DirectX APIs, AFAIK.

This is exactly it. It's designed to be as comfortable and easy to hold as a gamepad, but get as close to mouse + keyboard precision. There are Linux drivers for the PS3 Six-axis or Dual Shock 3 and XBOX 360 controllers (which should work just fine in Steam OS).

People criticizing this for *not* copying the tried and true gamepad design (two analog sticks, 1 d-pad, 4 side buttons, etc) are like people critiquing a pickup truck or sports car for not seating 4 and having enough room for all their groceries.

Sidenote - for thoese banging their heads against the wall trying to use a PS3 DS3 controller in windows using motion joy this guy made an awesome alternative that I got working with two controllers and works just peachy with Steam Big Picture .

PCSX2 emulates a lot of games properly on PC.
It's compatibility list currently stands at 78.25% of games:
http://pcsx2.net/compatibility-list.html

It is addictive. But I wish I could play it on a console or PC. I have discovered that using a handheld for hours on end really cramps up my neck. I don't have this problem reading books. Something about the ergonomics of a Vita is wrong.

It's a PS2 game, play it via the PS2 emulator pcsx2 emulator. http://pcsx2.net/

You can find a game image here: http://www.emuparadise.me/Sony_Playstation_2_ISOs/Shin_Megami_Tensei_-_Persona_4_(USA)/150805-download

free download, no need to register, downloading a copy of it now.

http://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-Sticky-Will-PCSX2-run-fast-on-my-computer

CPU wise it is probably more than up to the job. However memory subsystem wise? Probably not (think 48GB per sec just for 1 cpu). The RDRAM that was in the PS2 was decently fast.

You probably could get 100% CPU perfect emulation. Getting it to 100% speed. Not so much. There are at LEAST 6 CPUs in a PS2 (including a full hardware copy of the original PS1 which ran the IO subsystem). Plus the monster speed they were getting out of the RDRAM. The PCSX2 emu even uses many tricks just to get decent speed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2#Technical_specifications

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCSX2#Misconceptions_regarding_speed

http://pcsx2.net/blog.php

On top of all of that no one knows exactly everything that the thing does. As the people who know how the thing really works have cool jobs making other cpus and/or other cool things...

So it probably will be done. But it will take awhile. But dont hold your breath. The PS3 is a beast of a box compared to the PS2. However, it is not a 'standard' arch so on top of the weird arch the PS2 has the PS3 has its own weird one.

Also if they could tinker together a HW solution that costs say 50 bucks to build and sell for 100 they probably will. Plus it will be 99% perfect day one with little engineering overhead. The issue they will quickly run into is bandwidth. How to get info from this add on to the PS3. The ps3 has usb 2.0 outs and thats about it, i suppose they could do some sort of ethernet chain.
We shall see though...

I know that the JIT caches native opcodes. However, this also often prevents your code from fitting into the L1 cache, so it's going to run slower. After all, the JIT still has to do a lookup into it's own opcode cache each time. It's not magic pixie dust.

This is complete rubbish, you know. JIT means that the runtime environment includes a compiler, which complaisn the program to machine code as it is being run. This has disadvantages - the compiler naturally takes some time to run, and increases runtime size - and advantages: the JIT compiler can inline library routines, and profile and recompile performance-critical parts of the program as it's being run. However, the resulting compiled program is no different than if the compilation had been done beforehand; the machine code is simply never saved to a disk.

So no, JIT - of Java or anything else - doesn't cache native opcodes, it compiles parts of the program into native code that can be run without emulation, just like any other compiler. And JIT pretty much is magical pixie dust :). Seriously, try running something like pcsx2 (Playstation 2 emulator) on a modern PC and turning JIT on and off.

So do you want to explain how 256KB of memory per SPU * six SPUs adds up to 4MB? (hint: it doesn't), or how that finds its way to the 3D hardware for rendering/display. The GS (GPU in the PS2) is a three-memory-bus partitioned texture/display frankenstein, and the PS2 is a system with a lot of quirks. Just ask a console dev who lived through the PS2 about all of the little gotchas of the system, and buy them a beer to help mask the flashbacks.

Even if it were relatively simple to add this support, any work done on it would be from the ground up, as it is not the way that Sony chose to implement backwards compatibility. Fresh QA, fresh dev, etc.

The suggestion that PS2 support is just a software switch is a stupid mistake on George's part, plain and simple, and if PCSX2 is the bar, well, take a look at the compatibility list. It's definitely not ready for prime time.

Anyone who blindly states that anything in software, especially full system emulation, is "very trivial" is either an idiot or a liar.

But I'm afraid for Sony that PC-based emulators will get enough power with quad-cores CPU to run PS2 games flawlessly before they manage to provide a back-compatible PS3 again.

Aside from a few graphical issues and problems playing FMV (random black flickering every few seconds for me in FFXII) PCSX2 is pretty much there for a lot of games.

You need a half-decent GPU as well as a good processor to get the most out of it though.

And when you buy a Windows game you can only play it on windows? Last I heard, WINE is perfectly legal, and running games with WINE is also perfectly legal. Also, running a PS2 game in a PC PS2 emulator seems to be perfectly legal too. Console makers actually make their money primarily from games licensing, and often sell the actual console at a loss. Good luck finding a PS3 or Xbox360 emulator though...

My understanding is that the Power PC chips are actually SLOWER than x86-64 processor, but run much cooler, so MS went with them.

I don't know the details, I just dev for the thing.

And are you telling me that a Quad-core x86-64 machine couldn't emulate a TRI core power PC system? I find that hard to believe, even with the difference in instruction-sets.

Yep, that's what I'm telling you. Even better, you can't magically parallelize code, so having more than 3 cores wouldn't help much. So instead of getting the 4x performance you need for emulation by having a 12-core 3.2GHz cpu, you'd need a 3-core machine running at 12.8GHz.
And even that might not be enough, as the theoretical performance of the 3-core Xenon cpu of the xbox is actually twice that of the fastest quad-core desktop cpu.

You're not going to emulate a 360 any time soon. Hell, your wonderful quad-core system will struggle to emulate a PS2! Try it for yourself.

Let's keep in mind, Virtual machines are ALL emulation already. They are emulating a specific type of hardware that your system may or may not already have. The only limitation is core amounts. You can't emulate a CPU core your system doesn't have. Other than that, I really don't see how hard it would be to emulate a power-PC based system, as long as your machine had more cores than the system you were emulating.

Nope. There are two kinds of virtual machine, fully emulated machines which are horrifically slow (but compatible with a different instruction set), and virtualized machines which run directly on the cpu of the host (so must use the same instruction set as the host), only dropping back to the host to emulate a few devices, e.g. keeping the virtual machine's hard-disk in a file on the host's disk.

Most virtual machine software implements direct hardware passthrough to allow the child OS to have even a little performance at using the graphics card. You can't have direct hardware passthrough if the virtual hardware in the virtual machine doesn't match the hardware in the host.

What would be REALLY COOL is if the PS2 rendered at a higher resolution, i.e. transform and render all data into 1080p graphics buffer rather than upscaling a smaller one. It wouldn't do much for bitmaps and textures but polygons would be gorgeous at 1080p. Some of the screenshots from the PCSX2 emulator show how lovely it could look. Unfortunately PCSX2 runs like a dog, but perhaps the PS3 has the capabilities to actually pull this off, at least for some games.

Obviously proper scaling is also useful for Blu-Ray. Previously it would render a movie in 1080i and leave it to the TV to downscale it to 720p (any sane HDTV handles both resolutions). Now they actually do the scaling themselves which could make the picture quality marginally better.

ePSXe makes episodes VII,VIII & IX of Final Fantasy completely playable on the PC.
And, PcSX2 plays X and XII reasonably well on a high end rig.

Wow... I was about to send you some links and tell you "not too well" but...
http://www.pcsx2.net/compat.php?&c=f&s1=1&s2=1&s3= 1&s4=1&s5=1&p=3

Fucking sweet.

a system that can run PCSX2 ;) maybe now we'll get more people developing ps2 emulators ;)