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Emulation Arrives On the PS3
YokimaSun writes "Following the recent exploit that allows you to jailbreak your PS3, the homebrew community have now breached the console with the first homebrew game, which is the classic Pong. Also released is the first emulator for the system in the shape of a SNES Emulator great for those 16-bit games. Finally drk||Raziel, the coder of the Dreamcast Emulator NullDC, has posted screenshots of his Dreamcast emulator working on the PS3 (albeit at a very early stage). The PS3 is building up to be the Dream Console for emulation."
I am absolutely certain that Sony's upper management is absolutely thrilled at yet another demonstration of their brainchild's incredible versatility.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
...that Microsoft's Xbox 360 *still* has not been exploited? PS3 has had a number of exploits over the years, but Xbox 360 is still locked down tight. Too bad desktop Windows still has remote code execution vulnerabilities discovered every month...
They had hypervisor privileges years ago, it's just that it was a pain to implement. http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/461489
"Sony, in their infinite wisdom, didn't create PS3's that can read PS2 game discs." Well they did for a short time, until they realized that people actually liked being able to play their old games and new ones on the same system. Then they stopped making them capable with PS2 games.
Only an extremely small subset of PS3s actually can play PS2 games out of the box. Even fewer don't entirely depend on poor software emulation to do it.
I would think that the ability to run linux *again* might be of more interest here on /.
Having to crack a console to get functionality back sounds like a joke but I suspect few are laughing.
To get back to the topic at hand, given John Carmac's view of the PS3 architecture, it's likely that porting emulators for the more modern consoles (i.e., those that require 3D accelleration) may be a lot more trouble than it was for, say, the original Xbox.
John: I never liked the Cell architecture. You can get high peak numbers out of it, but software development time matters a lot, and not having caches and virtual memory makes development take a lot longer, especially for the majority of applications that don't fit neatly into the DMA pipeline model.
From http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ps3-playstation-3-linux-john-carmack,10035.html
I CAN HAS XBMC FOR THE PS3?
...that Microsoft's Xbox 360 *still* has not been exploited? PS3 has had a number of exploits over the years, but Xbox 360 is still locked down tight. Too bad desktop Windows still has remote code execution vulnerabilities discovered every month...
Probably an economic issue. Microsoft (and Sony, for that matter) doesn't make money from console hardware sales ... they need game sales to make a profit. So there's a clear incentive to make the Xbox hard to crack. Perhaps Microsoft is just better at that than Sony.
Have either of you actually played a video game before? Where do you get your intel from?
The 360 was the first to have a hypervisor exploit: http://www.xbox-scene.com/xbox1data/sep/EEZkykVkkFmojzapEq.php
The 360 was the first to allow playing burnt games: http://digg.com/news/technology/Modded_Xbox_360_Plays_Burned_Games
The 360 was the first to have homebrew: http://beta.ivancover.com/wiki/index.php/Xbox_360_King_Kong_Shader_Exploit
The first generation played PS2 disks perfectly, the second quite well and subsequent generations not at all. Though honestly, since there are now some very good PS3 titles at cheap prices, it becomes less and less relevant, this is Sony's thinking also I believe.
I have a backwards compatible PS3 and I think I last put a PS2 disk in there maybe two years ago, the scope of the current generation just allows for so much more in a game and my sense of nostalgia is not strong enough to persuade me to turn back. This may be a great place for the homebrew community to shine since frankly I think Sony's engineering efforts would be better spent elsewhere.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Sony, in their infinite wisdom, didn't create PS3's that can read PS2 game discs.
My PS3 reads and plays PS2 games quite well, actually: 60 GB PS3
The original 20 GB units would play PS2 games also.
The PS2 is a bitch to emulate because its processor and video processor are so strange. It doesn't even work all that great on high end modern PCs. Emulation incurs heavy overhead anyhow, but the more different the platforms, the harder it is. That's why PC on PC virtualization is so fast. You literally "virtualize" as in run most things natively, so you achieve high speeds.
Now maybe the Cell happens to be well designed for emulation the EE and VUs, but I kinda doubt it. If it were easy to do, I'd have thought Sony would do it to increase compatibility and keep people happy. Also the Cell's power seems to be in parallel processing and that is something that emulation doesn't do much of. I don't know that it couldn't, but it doesn't. Emulators are largely single thread, with maybe a second thread for some video rendering. PCSX2, the PS2 emulator, does use two threads well but that is it. Generally speaking, emulation coding seems to lag behind regular coding. Emulator authors seem to be good at emulation but not so good at current coding practices.
So my guess is probably not. It is just too powerful, and too odd, of a system to emulate on the PS3. You need a heavier hitting processor to do it, something like an i7.
Already blocked by a new firmware update.
So we're still stuck with the choice of running either PS3 games or homebrew, but not both.
There are already emulators for the 360, and have been for some time. The 360 also has the advantage of being a more computer-like architecture and thus taking less effort to make an efficient emu port.
However really, if emulation is your thing, a cheap media PC/netbook is the way to go. For anything that is, say, Playstation 1 or older, you need very little hardware to emulate it. Current PCs are plenty fast enough, even at the low end. Also, there are tons of emulators that are out and available and well developed. So to me, that seems to be the "dream system." If you have a media PC, just load up the emulators on it.
I don't see anything about the PS3 that makes it particularly suited to emulation as opposed to the 360.
A 100% software emulator to run PS2 software on the PS3 is entirely possible. The Xbox 1 is a much more powerful system than the PS2, and the Xbox 360 (which is inferior to the PS3) can emulate it perfectly, all in software. So it's only a matter of time before a PS2 emulator appears on the PS3.
The funny thing about this is Sony has recently patented a hardware PS2 addon for the PS3.. if/when the homebrew scene releases a PS2 emulator, Sony is going to look very stupid....and greedy to almost every PS3 owner in the world!
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=264597
-Copyright law #69:Whenever Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain,copyrights get extended by 25 years.
I don't know what all this Ceche crap is, but my full size PS3 can't even read a PS2 disc, which is a load of crap.
If I'd known that before I bought it, I wouldn't have shelled out $300. PS3's are getting to be more and more of a rip off as time goes on. It's ridiculous and indefensible.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
I disagree with Sony that the negative effects would outweigh the positive effects. However, if any developer could write a game that could play on PS3, using Linux with full access to PPC, SPUs and RSX (all the PS3 HW), they could indeed write games that any PS3 owner could get and play. Those games would directly compete with Sony-licensed games, but without paying Sony a license, and without paying for a Sony development environment. So Sony would not get any revenue from those games, which is where all their profit comes from (the console is sold at a loss). And it would make it harder for Sony to negotiate with even big developers, like EA and movie studios like Lucas (though maybe just those a little smaller than that), to get license money for "the real thing", when they could threaten to do it the free way instead. So I see why Sony wants to lock every game into licensing.
However, that explosion in games would sell a lot more consoles. Not just to developers and hackers, but to people playing all those other games. It would drive down game prices, especially with free games competing. But cheaper games would sell many more copies. Overall I expect that the bigger share of the platform market and the overwhelming number of games ("something for everyone, no matter how lame") would mean more licensed games sold, even if a much smaller slice of a much, much bigger pie. But Sony is a company that loves "premiums", so I don't think Sony's execs see it that way. Especially since Sony is a record label and movie studio, which means it's a big part of the RIAA and MPAA crusades against openness, so its corporate culture has talked itself into the value of DRM and exclusion despite repeated lessons to the contrary.
I don't have statistical studies of anything to demonstrate that opening the platform would grow Sony's profits rather than shrink them. Sony doesn't have actual data to the contrary, either. So it's my gut feeling against Sony's, and Sony's of course wins. But it does seem to be losing lots of important battles, and overall the war. Maybe eventually some kind of desperation will get Sony to change course. Like if a really definitive crack showed openness is easier, while closedness is much harder and doesn't save that much anymore. Maybe this crack, or the next one following up on it, are the ones.
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make install -not war
Go look at PCSX2. All the video processing is done by your GPU, and thus you do get things like better resolution than the PS2 and so on. They make extensive use of HEL tricks, dynamic recompilation and so on. However for all that it is still slow. Also please remember the more tricks, the more problems. UltraHLE was neat but ran all of about 8 games.
There was also a big advantage emulating the processor: It was a very simple design. At its heart, it was just a MIPS R4300i. A well documented processor, with a simple instruction set. Also, few games made use of its 64-bit capabilities so pretending it wasn't was not a big deal for emulators.
The Emotion Engine? Much stranger. MIPS based, but all sorts of additional instructions, many not well documented by Sony. Heavily uses 64-bit (integer and floating point) and has 128-bit FP capability too. In particular the real problem happens with the VU0 and VU1 units, which are 128-bit vector units. The sort of stuff they do would normally be on the GPU in a computer, but it is on the CPU in the PS2.
At any rate, it is a difficult system to emulate, at least for the people trying to do so. If you think you could do a better job, it would be wonderful if you took a swing at it. I do get the feeling from what I've seen that many of the emulation programs aren't the best and brightest at programming overall, they just like emulation.
However as it stands, the very best PS2 emulator out there requires a heavy hitting system to make possible. You need a good CPU, good video card, and even then it can be slow and buggy.
FYI, the PSX and the DC aren't all that close. The Saturn was of the same generation as the PSX and was more complex/powerful, and the DC was the next generation. It may not be outside the realm, but it'll likely take a while.
The summary only said "dream console" because it sounds neat. I think a Wii is worth having for its unique qualities, but an Xbox does everything you mentioned and is much cheaper. I'm sure a few other systems have that many emulation abilities as well.
Should have done your homework before you went out and bought it, or at least asked about it.
The original, japanese run had the full set of PS2 hardware built-in, and didn't so much emulate as switch systems. Then came a nice series for US and EU, that has software emulation. That emulation is not perfect, but pretty good; and we still play ps2 games from time to time.
Only about the time the slims were starting to get mentioned, iirc, did the PS2 emulation also vanish. Do your homework and have a look on ebay for the right model, then sell your newer one. I seem to recall Wikipedia having a quite exhaustive list of all the models.
What a depressingly stupid machine.