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Setting Up Ubuntu On a PS3 For Emulation
Gizmodo is running a guide on how to install Ubuntu on a Playstation 3 and set it up to play vintage games through emulation. Quoting:
"It still kind of surprises me (in a good way) that Sony was, from the start, very OK with PS3 owners tinkering with Linux on their PS3s. A modified release of Yellow Dog Linux was available from the very beginning, and some very handy hard drive partitioning and dual-boot utilities are baked right into the PS3's XMB; Ubuntu gets installed on an entirely separate partition of your PS3's hard disk, so your default system doesn't get touched and switching between Ubuntu and the XMB is a piece of cake. There is a flipside to this coin, however. Since the PS3's Cell Processor is PowerPC based, you won't be able to use any Linux software that's compiled for x86, which is, unfortunately, most of it. However, Ubuntu has always had a PPC distro, and most of the basic stuff will work just fine. You can even load up a PPC-compiled Super Nintendo Emulator, SNES9X, and play some classic games pretty easily on your Sixaxis controller paired via Bluetooth."
Would it be too slow to load a slim PPC kernel and replace init with an optimized PPC-compiled qemu instance (basically; it would require much more than this) and run a virtual x86 machine on that? It seems the downsize would be: two kernels and an image in non-volatile storage, (although they aren't that big, not much difference), RAM would be a premium, consider some paging (and a minimalistic hypervisor kernel running a slim custom client kernel, goodbye canonical support), and those Cell CPUs would fare just fine with it.
It seems like a long shot, but it could work with at the very least "decent" results, after a fair amount of hacking and gnu optimization (store more crap on the registers than RAM). Compiz would kill on those graphics cards, and if paging is light you could have project 64 running in WINE for the best Nintendo 64 experience since... the Nintendo 64! Gee Willigers!
That is, assuming qemu can do x86->PPC, else find an alternative (or write one, hey!)
All the software on my linux box (an ARM machine) was either compiled by me or came from the debian apt repositories (compiled for ARM). That's no different than if I was using x86. I fail to see what the issue is, unless you need to run closed source software or something tightly coupled to the x86 architecture, like WINE or virtual box.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
linux on ps3 sucks balls:
no access to gpu
10 gigs of disk space
~256 megs of memory
crappy ppc processor which meant for the stuff I wanted to do with it (read: boxee), I didn't have the libs.
A roommate of mine that has unfortunately moved out has a PS3 and a big HDTV. We spent a lot of time playing PS3. Some of those new games look amazing in HD... really amazing.
Despite this, we spent a lot more time playing roms under ubuntu. I've always used ZSNES on my computers, but unfortunately some of it is written in X86 compiler. SNES9X works great on PS3 ubuntu though, and finding emulators for other systems compiled for PPC really isn't hard at all.
>Since the PS3's Cell Processor is PowerPC based, you won't be
>able to use any Linux software that's compiled for x86, which is,
>unfortunately, most of it.
I have to say, to most linux users, the specific architecture and processor really aren't meaningful. The linux kernel, gnu userland, and associated popular applications have always been distributed in source code first, and binaries as they are made available. The entire concept of open-source depends on source distribtion.
It is absolutely no problem if an app is distributed in source form or binary (compiled). True, a "standard" linux install base, while it may be defined, is rarely realized. So you could argue that distributing in source code creates problems because needed dependencies can't always be met. But then again, this doesn't help with binary distribution either. Ever try to install an RPM on a non-rpm-ish linux distro? It can be done, yes, but it involves a lot of details. Just as compiling does.
Debian is awesome for distributing such a wide range of apps compiled for so many architectures. But it is truly sad to see someone write that it is "unfortunate" that most linux installs are x86 and his is ppc. The entire concept of linux is that linux is a kernel and a userland distributed in source. It doesn't matter what hardware you have (within reasonable limits... toasters, watches, etc).
There's nothing "unfortunate" about an intel chip, a sparc processor, or a power pc, in terms of the ability of linux to run on it. It's a bigger deal if you're running generic pc hardware with some new video or wifi card. But even this sort of par for the course these days.
Would it be too slow to load a slim PPC kernel and replace init with an optimized PPC-compiled qemu instance {...} and run a virtual x86 machine on that? It seems the downsize would be: two kernels and an image in non-volatile storage {...} That is, assuming qemu can do x86->PPC, else find an alternative (or write one, hey!)
All this is an absolute overkill.
If there are a couple of binary-only Linux applications that you have to run on PS3 and they are only compiled for x86, there's QEMU which has a special mode for running Unix-on-Unix, where it emulates an x86 CPU only for the x86 application and passes through all system calls to the actual native OS.
The DarWINE project is exactly doing that to run Windows applications on PPC Mac OS X boxes : the windows application and assorted Wine glue code goes inside QEMU, the call translated to Unix libraries go to the native system.
If you need to run Windows application, probably DarWine isn't that far from being runnable on PPC Linux.
And if you need to run old-school DOS games, DosBox has a built-in x86 emulator anyway.
The "emulate a full x86 Linux running inside a PPC Linux" is just a complete waste of resources.
And, as pointed by other /.ers, the PS3 hypervisor doesn't let Linux access the GPU anyway. So no Compiz, no hardware accelerated emulation of consoles with 3D chips (no N64, no PSX without PS3's own OS, no DreamCast, etc.)
Still there's a good access to the Cell's stream processing units, so Linux on PS3 has a good value for doing scientific calculation, and there's an attempt to accelerate Mesa 3D with the SPUs, in order to have some hardware-accelerated OpenGL, even without the GPU.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If the cell is so much better, then, how come nothing on the PS3 demonstrates a massive superiority over a decent, new pc?
Yes, I'm sure they aren't utilizing it completely, and in a few years the games will be more impressive. By then, of course, pc hardware will have advanced more dramatically.
"If the cell is so much better, then, how come nothing on the PS3 demonstrates a massive superiority over a decent, new pc?
Yes, I'm sure they aren't utilizing it completely..."
Well, in the one sense you're right, if games shops don't learn to program properly for cell in pretty short order then the PC market will get ahead again. Actually that's pretty inevitable, because consoles are never quite cutting edge when released and then sink back from there.
OTOH, look up roadrunner and other mixed Opteron/Cell supercomputers. The cell is pretty shit-hot, if you know what you're doing with it, and it's not like they released one version and stuck with it. We have faster Cell chips than are in the PS3 now.
I don't know what the numbers are for the PS3, but typically game consoles are sold at cost or at a loss, with the plan being that game royalties, licensing, and other goodies make up for the loss. They are traditionally the real revenue stream.
Assuming this is the case for the PS3, the last thing they want is a bunch of people buying up consoles for use as Linux machines. That would be a quick trip to the poor house for Sony. The only way I could seem them opening up a box for that kind of use would be to sell a much more expensive Linux version. I can only imagine the whining and gnashing of teeth that would trigger.
It seems to me the only point in running Linux on the PS3 is just to see if it can be done. In the end, it's probably about as useful as ucLinux on the iPod. It was cool to do it, but it sucked so badly that I went back to the provided OS fairly quickly.
For the first generation PS3, I think sony's loss was $2-300/console. They ditched the emotion engine and other efficiencies have cut the loss to closer to $100/console. I might be making those numbers up, though.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I was under the impression that possession is 9/10ths of the law.
The other tenth is copyright law, specifically 17 USC 1201 and other countries' legislation implementing the WIPO Copyright Treaty of 1996.
Kind of like owning a gun. You can own a gun and use it however you want
Even in the United States with its loose gun laws, residents can't own an assault rifle.
For the price of a PS3, you can get a nice, cheap, dual core system with at least 1GB of RAM. Unlike the PS3, you'll have access to the graphics hardware.
But can the graphics hardware in an off-the-shelf "nice, cheap, dual core system" output a composite or S-Video signal for an SDTV to use? There's a huge installed base of SDTVs that are large enough for three or four people to fit around comfortably. The advantage of $400 game consoles over $400 PCs is that game consoles are guaranteed to have SDTV output, unlike the desktop PCs that I could find at Office Depot.
Despite [the amazing look of PS3 games' graphics in high definition], we spent a lot more time playing roms under ubuntu.
What copier did you use to dump the roms from your Super NES Game Paks?
I've been thinking, wouldn't this make a shit hot box to do h.264 encoding on? Isn't that one of the things that the cell is optimized for? SMP across 9 cell cores doing h.264 encoding and I know when encoding a dvd that handbrake uses virtually no memory on my dual core amd64 box. Just an honest question.
My Babylon
Mod parent up...
The issue at this point isn't so much about having a coherent desktop - KDE provides that. (I can't personally vouch for Gnome...) The issue is that this "coherent desktop" is less a feature of "Linux" per se and more a feature of KDE (or Gnome). This desktop can run applications that aren't part of the environment - but if you want the integration you have to stick to stuff that really is part of that environment.
Bow-ties are cool.
putting a rocket engine on your honda civic? Yes, you can do it, but why would you want to?
You claim that desktop PCs have no SDTV output because they were purchased at Office Depot. So where do you recommend to buy a ready-to-run desktop gaming PC with SDTV output for $400?
I wish that he would have mentioned some way to run MAME, that's better than SNES games anyway.
Also, here is a way to run a fast Mplayer on PS3 Linux. This custom version of Mplayer uses the SPUs. I have an 80 GB PS3 and I'm eager to try some of this stuff out.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Well yes you can "hobby" linux on your PS3... sony even provides some help... but if you think you're going to get anything cool out of it, think again, it's just going to be a hobby...
1. No HD... wow SD is so "cool"
2. No GPU... wow my PS3 has such cool 3d graphics... or not!!
So basically you get a low end computer with the inconvenience of PPC (so you can't use the majority of binaries) it's non-usefulness as a slick media player (no HD etc) or a "Game machine" (no x86 or GPU) basically means it's a big fail and thanks to Sony for a hobby "yes it runs linux" -- but no cool features.
In fact, one of the "reasons" for having a computer, e.g. playing copied games of course will not work as that's not what Sony wants you to do with "your" hardware... they would prefer you use their OS, their software etc
I'd like to run Crysis on there...but it's PPC, and i don't feel like QEMUing it on 1GB RAM (I upgraded it)
Call me when Linux runs as like a 'game' on the PS3 and I don't have to reboot everything and sacrifice access to my friends list, etc.
As it stands, it's just too much work to reboot into Ubuntu mode on the PS3 to have it be worth my while. (Yes, I tried it for a while.)
Maybe if all my other systems were broken and I couldn't afford to buy a new one... But then, I'd be a sad techie if that were ever the case.
And let's face it, this is only for techies.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM