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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?"
I'll drink to that. I got the NES and SNES emulators working on the Wii, and in all honesty I haven't played many modern games since. Getting back into the Megaman and Final Fantasy series is a pretty neat experience, especially on a new HDTV with a wireless controller. All my childhood dreams of having remote access to all of my games without having to blow in the cartridge have finally come true. Now kindly get off my lawn!
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
I don't know. When the company claims that a product is still for "early adapters" two years after it's release...that's almost flop-worthy.
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
You've obviously never used Linux on the PS3 at all and are trolling. I've used my bluetooth keyboard on Linux with the PS3 since first installing it 2 years ago. That's on YDL, Ubuntu, and Fedora. Secondly, all the RAM has been usable for some time now so once again you are trolling.
I haven't been keeping track of consoles much, but I can imagine that being true, from how many kids I've (dismayingly) heard talking about their XBoxes. Also, many kids and adults (a niche market which Playstations have traditionally been strong in) have gone with Wii.
I've definitely do idea on the veracity of those figures. BUT, even if they've lost a ton of money on PS3, there is perhaps still light at the end of the tunnel for Sony. They based it on Cell, which is designed to scale easily. If that really happened in practice, and if the PS3 didn't bypass all that and just use the raw power without the scaleability, then it should be a relatively simple process to make a PS4, based on their existing, mass-producible tech, but with a few more Cell chips on the bus.
I said 'last time I checked' the bluetooth did not work, after which I haven't bothered to check on it again because it was already obvious it sucks for anything but Cell development.
And using the ps3vram driver you do _not_ have full access to the 256 MB video RAM, you can use it, but the bandwidth is terrible because it actually uses the GPU to DMA memory back and forth to a window in (directly accessible) XDR memory, because the bandwidth of the 2nd half of memory to the CPU is about 8MB/s (or something similarly slow, you get the point). The way it's used with ps3vram this is only useful as swap space, and even then swapping to the HD is almost as fast.
You obviously don't really know much about how PS3 linux works at all and are astroturfing.
It strikes me that people who try to hype up the PS3's emulation under linux have never tried it.
I have, ignoring the large amount of tweaking to get a distro working properly with the PS3 hardware/HDTV (I've tried yellow dog and ubuntu), the emulation just isn't very good.
At least with an NES emulator you'll be able to run a game at full speed. However, good luck getting it fit to the screen properly or get it working with PS3 gamepad (again more tweaking). Other systems, SNES, GENESIS, don't have an emulator that is going to run at full speed on the PS3.
Other software suffers from the same problems, lack of selection and slow performance. Maybe this will change in the future, but right now linux on the cell isn't that great for desktop style apps. Yet I see it hyped up all the time, but people who either haven't bothered to try it, or are fine with a lot of tweaking for a extremely sluggish emulation/desktop experience. Just because you can do it, doesn't always mean that it is worth doing.
You think that is great? Get a big screen TV and play Super Mario Bros. 3 on big world.
Oh God, the pixels, the pixels are coming to get me!!!!
It depends on which emulator you're using. If you're using the official Virtual Console emulator, it'll look blocky because vcNES uses nearest-neighbor resampling. But if you're using an emulator that supports Scale2x, hq2x, or some other smart resampling method for line art, you can get NES games to look better than TG16 in some cases and Super NES games to look nearly PS1-quality.
There are several projects, like spu-medialib and mesa3d, which accelerate PS3 graphics/video on the Cell's SPEs. spu-medialib is actually a general framework for acceleration, while mesa3d offloads OpenGL onto the SPEs as a GPU. Why don't you put some of those people you say you're training to program the Cell onto those projects and give something back to the community that's given you the programmable platform?
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make install -not war
Listen, I've tried PS3 linux before, I know what the hardware is, and I know what the limitations of PS3 linux are. These have not changed (apart from the bluetooth thing), and these are not bound to change. ie: the 2nd half of memory will always be basically useless, and the RSX will never be fully accessible from PS3 linux.
So effectively, there is no hope PS3 linux will get more useful than it already is, which is how it was when I checked it out. I've been running it for a few months which was about a year ago, and back then it broke 3 times on firmware updates. How you would know better how much time I spent with it eludes me...
If you don't believe what I'm saying about PS3 linux: go ahead and try it anyway, I couldn't care less, not my PS3, not my spare time. Just find out yourself how terrific it works and how much I'm trolling here. Don't see why I would be trolling about PS3 linux on Slashdot anyway but hey, some people here obviously feel better screaming troll all the time.