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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?"
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.
Fedora? Where do you get that? It's Red Hat/CentOS based.
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...
Or you can try Xubuntu for the ppc - they now simultaneously release for the ppc architecture.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
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)
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.