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Emulation Explosion On the PS3 Via Linux
Marty writes "The PlayStation 3 has recently seen an explosion
of releases of emulators and games for the Yellow Dog Linux distro for PS3;
once you have installed Yellow
Dog Linux you then have the ability to try out MAME,
SNES, Amiga, Dos,
Commodore and Atari
emulators (that's the tip of the iceberg) and such games as Quake
2, Duke Nukem 3D, Hexen 2 and Alephone. Time to start installing Linux on your PS3?"
Yellow Dog Linux is sooo buggy and is based on the now comparativley ancient Fedora 6, why don't just install Fedora 10 for PPC on the PS3 instead, .
There plenty of emulators in the Fedora repos and Fedora works fine on the PS3.
CN=poolmeister.OU=lurkers.CN=slashdot
1. First of all, there are more options for PS3 then YD including Gentoo, Ubuntu, Fedora, and others.
2. Access (due to Sony scared of people making good games for PS3 Linux for 'free') to the RSX (graphics card) is very restricted. A few firmware revisions ago it was accessible but of course that gets fixed. And without the latest firmware, you cannot play certain games.
The PS3 is a flop anyway. If you want to emulate these mentioned systems, you are way better off with a PC, Xbox 1, or Wii.
I cry everytime people don't remember the hardworking folks over at the Freespace SCP when it comes to Linux gaming....
http://scp.indiegames.us/
and
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php
for more info.
Over a million posts in their forum debugging an amazing game.
I'm wasting mod points I used earlier in this story just to correct your idiotic point of view (I've seen this before, mostly from kids who have no clue that there's a world beyond gaming).
Linux on PS3 clusters, used for scientific computing, is a huge success. Sony openly supported Linux from the start on their console with precisely this sort of work in mind.
Get off the couch and go do something productive.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
I'd recommend not to. It's dog slow because you can only use 256 MB RAM, you don't have video acceleration, last time I checked I didn't have bluetooth (which means no wireless keyboard and mouse and no sixaxis), and Sony regularly (mostly unintentionally) breaks the system with firmware updates (at least up to the point you need to spend time to get it booting again). Unless you really want to program the Cell CPU Linux on the PS3 is pretty much worthless. Aside from some simple emulators for ancient systems you can forget doing anything useful on it.
The PS3 programming scene is also about as dead as it can be. I've been lurking on ps2dev for years and it's still the same 5 people and nothing has really been achieved yet...
Bzzt.. Wrong...
YellowDog 6.1 allows access to the GPU memory too...
It's the only distro that ships with the kernel patches that allow it to do so, but there is nothing stopping any distro picking up the kernel patch.
http://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/9858/
not too much
indeed you are right about bluetooth, but using the video mem is not of much help with the ram shortage
why?
because its video mem
you can copy very fast into it, so swapping out to it works well
-but- reading from it is painfully slow, and all in all using hdd's for swap is more convenient
i wish we would get some more acceleration than using the cpu dma for pushing data around - that would make ps3 linux quite usable
but in its current state it is really only for those usable, like me, who wish to train cell programming (which is not that difficult as some like to explain in the media)
Much more friendly than the accursed Microsoft though, still no progress (real) towards Linux on there, makes me wish I bought a PS3 :-/
Microsoft has the XNA API for homebrew games.... and they let you sell games on their network. I'd say that's pretty friendly.
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The parent here makes it sound like you should be able to just write a few lines of code and set a compile flag to have your program start using the SPEs on the Cell. That's completely untrue - you'd need to write some very specific, very custom code to use them, as they're basically just very fancy DSPs with regards to C coding.
As a point of reference, no one's ported x264 to use the Cell for encoding, and that's the sort of application that the Cell is supposed to be very good with. IIRC, part of the issue was that each SPE only has 256kb of cache on it, which is rather marginal for high resolution rendering (you can't fit a whole 1080p frame into the SPE).
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Are you high?
You can't install anything but the "official" PS3 Linux. Once you have that going you can bootstrap anything you want into it.
HOWEVER, the only one which isn't broken by the firmware updates is the official port. This is also why bluetooth works for some people but not others, you don't get it by default.
For all people complain the XBOX is a PC, the PS3 is most certainly not.
When I tried it 10 months ago, it wasn't smooth at all. Xvid was good, though.
Does the hypervisor restrict access to usb? Ie, will other devices such as an external hard drive and a tuner card work?
No, it doesn't. External USB drives should work fine, as should your tuner card if you have the driver
Actually I know the guy who's working on spu-medialib, he's unsolo from ps2dev.org. I've actually been exchanging some thoughts with him back when I was playing around trying to do video decoding on the PS3. Anyway, spu-medialib is far from complete and doesn't nearly make up for the lack of GPU acceleration, there hasn't been any major improvements since back when I was playing around with PS3 linux. You can still forget even getting 720p playback on PS3 linux. Don't know about the state Mesa/Gallium/anything else to do 3D on the Cell, but judging from the activity on PS3 dev forums there's nothing interesting for end-users there either.
I get 1080p HD playback (and all the lower frame/bitrates, too) just fine using unsolo's spu-medialib mplayer -vo driver on my PS3, as I have for about a year now.
The mesa3d project is highly active, including this month, on their dev email list.
There seems to be quite a lot of interest in PS3 programming to both developers and to end users - like playing video (directly to an HDMI TV) on a $400 PS3 that would crush a PC costing 2-5x as much, that includes all that other stuff like Blu-Ray, Bluetooth, and lots of games (in GameOS mode).
--
make install -not war
Quake 2 ran on a Pentium/90 with 16MB.
Sure you're not talking about Quake 1 here (at least for software mode)?
I didn't say it ran well. ;) You'd want a fair bit more to get best performance out of it, but 90mHz/16MB is the official minimum spec. Either way, the PS3 should have no trouble handling it.
You sound a lot like that unsolo dude himself you know? Like a Sony/IBM advertisement.
Anyway, I'm not calling you a liar, maybe you do have some video's that somewhat work in 1080p, maybe you don't, I don't know but I highly doubt that you actually have a setup that reliably plays random 1080p videos. The reason is that no-one I know of can confirm an OSS player exists that can do that, and there's loads of people confirming even 720p MPEG with mplayer -vo ps3 is choppy and h264 is a slideshow. In other words just like it was a year ago. I can't find any videos on Youtube that seem very suspect to be fake either, and there's no-one on the dev forums saying he got 1080p h264 working either. But all the better if you can prove me wrong...
If I'd be able to write a codec on the SPE's: I don't know. I gave up when all hope for GPU acceleration on linux was lost. Just like most other people hacking away at the PS3. There's hardly a scene left for PS3 linux, mostly straightforward porting of simple emulators, and besides that some research stuff like Gallium3D.