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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?"
Yo, Dawg! I herd you like playin' consoles so I put a console in yo console so you can play while you play!
I now feel somewhat happier.
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 really can't see a good reason to install Linux on a PS3 except for once again proving that Linux goes on everything with a microchip. I'd rather buy a cheap pc for Linux, and have a working keyboard...
This message was brought to you by Sarcasm and Troll Feeders United (STFU)
Most of those programs worked on the PS3 day one. I am not aware of what makes this a new development.
[20:36] wwwdot/.dotorg
Please name an emulator which works on the PS3 today and didn't in 2007.
"Explosion" implies that there are many such emulators, and that they all showed up recently. In fact, I don't know of any at all, and it's hardly an "explosion" for a Linux system to have access to a bunch of common Linux packages. What next? "Emulator explosion on the Eee" headlines because my specific Eee has access to more emulators than it did when I bought it?
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
All those fancy cell cores with their gigahertzes and gigaflops, the hdd with its gigabytes and then bluray, just to play a game of Hunt the Wumpus! Hunt in shiny HD ascii!
The reason to put Linux on a PS3 is the same as it has been since release day: access to the wonderfully (sinfully?) complex Cell.
If the thought of 6 128-bit wide vector processors hanging off the back of a general purpose CPU gets you all hot and bothered, the Linux on the PS3 is a great place to start.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
Just because it's called Yellow Dog Linux v6, does NOT mean it's based on Fedora 6. Rather, it's based on the latest RedHat and CentOS code, and is much more similar to an upcoming version 6 of these products.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
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
Sony locked it down with a firmware update. My biggest complaint about Sony is they're not very friendly to homebrew game developers (not that any of the console makers are).
And seriously? "It'll look stupid compared to someone running MGS4?" Is that REALLY supposed to compare? You don't find it in the least bit awesome that you can get all your favorite old games (that you own already, obviously) on your HDTV with a wireless controller? Are you really saying that the PS3 would be better if it did less? What kind of geek are you?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Someone who's noticed that most games these days suck perhaps?
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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.
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.
Download free e-books, lectures, and tutorials at bookgoldmine.com
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.
Does that 28.9M include replacements for the dead ones? ;)
Depends on your idea of what is a fun game. If I can have an Atari 800 emulator and M.U.L.E. on my PS3, that pretty much doubles the entertainment value of the machine for my family.
Yeah, GT5 is more impressive, but racing split-screen isn't nearly as easy or fun as playing a highly multi-player oriented game like M.U.L.E.
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.
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
"Only" 256MB RAM? Accurate or not, what do you think we're emulating here? The SNES had a total of 256 kilobytes of RAM, with cartridge ROMs topping at 6MB. Quake 2 ran on a Pentium/90 with 16MB.
The PS3's specs might be a problem for a Windows box that demands half a gig for OS overhead, but Linux isn't supposed to have those problems.
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
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.
There's a narrative tutorial for installing the spu-medialib mplayer driver, with links to files, that plays video on the SPEs quite well, including 1080p HD videos.
The USB works fine, so an external HD should work fine. I don't know whether there are PPC (the Cell's application core) drivers for a USB tuner card, but you should try it. If it doesn't work, make it work with some programming. That's what Linux is all about :).
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make install -not war
As soon as I can play my PS2 games on a PS3, I might look into buying one.
I disagree.
We're in an age where some incredible games are being released. The indie scene is more alive than it's been since the days of Doom. When I bought my first indie game, Pontifex, back in 2000, it was a strange thing. Today, for the first time in history, you can actually buy an indie game right from your xbox. I bought Braid and N+ this weekend and it took about 20 seconds. The commercial scene has some incredible players, like Valve Software, who keep on churning out unique titles like Left 4 Dead and Portal.
Sure there are brownfest WWII shooters, but that's always been the case. Download a rompack for the SNES and NES, and see how many games are actually any good. You'll be shocked at the massive amount of crap you have to sift through to find the diamonds.
It's been a long time.
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.
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).
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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.
One of my pals here in SoCal is getting closer and closer to destroying the hypervisor restrictions. He's managed to get a few commands directly to GPU and memory, and once he figures out how to get all commands to it (although from what I'm told there is a performance hit of about 40%, for reasons I'm not technically competent enough to understand,) then it's going to be a much more fun system to play with. Hell, if I could run games and whatnot through the PS3 with Linux I'd unhook my PC from the TV and just let the PS3 handle it instead. There is serious power potential in the PS3. Sony should have unlocked it and dropped the price another 50 bucks. I'm willing to bet that would have a LOT of new customers coming to it.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Buy the 80GB model, which does allow you to play PS2 games, natively as they added the hardware.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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.