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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."
Nope, I'm sure Sony's upper management is thrilled to see that homebrew is being created using their leaked SDK. This guarantees that PS3 homebrew is and always will be illegal, and therefore can never be legitimate in the grand scheme of things. Sony will be free to legally threaten any homebrew communities.
People, this is the wrong way to go. It will just end up like the Xbox1, whose homebrew scene was underground (except for linux-based stuff). Not a good plan. Instant satisfaction (using Sony's leaked tools instead of writing your own) only works in the short term. This can be fixed, but only if people care instead of going for the quick and dirty way.
We already have a perfectly good port of Linux to the PS3, capable of replacing lv2 while gaining RSX/3D funcionality thanks to the new exploits. How about we concentrate on getting that to work instead of illegally using Sony's OS and tools?
Plus, nobody really knows how Sony's software ecosystem works yet. For all we know, at one point, all users who have ever installed a homebrew pkg (even if they update later) will have their consoles permanently banned from PSN.
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.