Slashdot Mirror
The Quest To Build Xbox One and PS4 Emulators
Nerval's Lobster writes "Will Xbox One and PS4 emulators hit your favorite download Websites within the next few years? Emulators have long been popular among gamers looking to relive the classic titles they enjoyed in their youth. Instead of playing Super Mario Bros. on a Nintendo console, one can go through the legally questionable yet widespread route of downloading a copy of the game and loading it with PC software that emulates the Nintendo Entertainment System. Emulation is typically limited to older games, as developing an emulator is hard work and must usually be run on hardware that's more powerful than the original console. Consoles from the NES and Super NES era have working emulators, as do newer systems such as Nintendo 64, GameCube and Wii, and the first two PlayStations. While emulator development hit a dead end with the Xbox 360 and PS3, that may change with the Xbox One and PS4, which developers are already exploring as fertile ground for emulation. The Xbox 360 and PS4 feature x86 chips, for starters, and hardware-assisted virtualization can help solve some acceleration issues. But several significant obstacles stand in the way of developers already taking a crack at it, including console builders' absolute refusal to see emulation as even remotely legal."
Usually the emulator comes when the console becomes obsolete right?
well, it took me two times to read the blurb but now I'm fairly certain that what they're referring to is emulators that would play the games from ps4 and xboxone(and fanbois are now yelling that we don't want that since h4x0000rrss would ruin our games. well guess fucking what they'll ruin your games anyways if the game is stupidly coded and you'll get some programmed bots anyways soon enough on your online games).
for the other way around, IF we get a way to run homebrew there will be emulators ported.. see
http://dev360.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Emulators
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Nah... there won't be any good games released for these consoles that aren't on PC already. Which is probably the #1 reason.
You can get almost all of the same games for the PC you're using to emulate the console. They're probably much cheaper on the PC. The PC versions will probably work better than the console versions plus the emulator. The online functions of the consoles will probably never work on the emulator.
It seems like a lot of effort to build something inferior.
Other way 'round.
They want to grab whatever firmware or libraries or executables make those devices special compared to a white-box x86-based PC. That's probably a lot easier than discovering the checksum/certificate used to verify a 'signed' application and use it to develop a bootloader to run unsupported software on the device, since the tools required to do the former are already contained on each of them.
I'd rather see people working on emulating the last generations consoles. Or the one before that even. The PS2 has one emulator, PCSX2, which is about 80% compatible. The original Xbox has no currently developed emulators.
There's no shortage of ways to play old 8bit and 16bit games. There is a shortage of ways to play last generation games. When our 360s and PS3s finally give up in 5 to 10 years, there's a large number of games that simply won't be playable anymore.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Those systems are locked down so tight, they won't allow ANY outside software to be installed, much less software specifically designed to allow for unauthorized games to be played (and mostly pirated ones at that). So, good luck with that. You will have to AT LEAST jailbreak them first.
Aaahhahhahhah. :D Good job reading what the article is about. It's about writing an emulator for a desktop x86 computer to play PS4/XBone games.
Zelda was cool when you were 10 BECAUSE you were 10.
Move on.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
It's not questionable, it's illegal. Ask the copyright holders. No, not making it available doesn't make it questionable.
I'm fairly certain that what they're referring to is emulators that would play the games from ps4 and xboxone
Good lord, that's an even taller order. I think they may have just recently developed emulators for the Xbox1 and PS2 (and I'm not even sure how well those work).
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
But several significant obstacles stand in the way of developers already taking a crack at it, including console builders' absolute refusal to see emulation as even remotely legal.
Well that's not surprising. The battle isn't to win the hearts of Microsoft and Sony. The battle is to win rights from the governments that enforce these restrictions.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
On the plus side, emulating an AMD x86 and GPU is likely to be considerably easier (especially since AMD's current or near-future PC parts are likely to be extremely similar in most respects, though you will probably have to go up a few speed grades to deal with the emulator running on top of a full OS) than emulating either the relatively fast PPCs of the previous generation (PPC-on-x86 is done; but doing that really fast is another story) or the slow-but-somewhat-esoteric-and-absolutely-every-oddity-was-used-and-abused architectures of the older consoles.
On the minus side, the odds are good that both new consoles (especially the Xbox, given MS's software side; but probably the PS as well) contain a lot of software that, while not integral to the tightly-optimized-graphics-twiddling aspects of the games, will probably have to be given a fairly precise "WINE-like" treatment to avoid breaking things all over the place. Not necessarily impossible (as WINE itself demonstrates); but definitely a different game than the 'emulate the hardware and let the ROM do as it will' emulators that work for older consoles.
On the very minus side, it would not be out of character for either MS or Sony to have added some nasty copy-protection-related cryptographic goodies that will be very hard to emulate. MS, given their PC background, might well have gone for a TPM. Architecturally, emulating one of those would be cake by the standards of what the emulation scene has taken on, except for minor matters like the endorsement key. A TPM emulator that emulates a TPM loaded with the 2048-bit RSA private key of your choice? Sure, no problem. The correct private keys? That might be an issue.
Despite the hardware platform being x86-64, there is probably a ton of hoops to jump through to discover precisely how the hardware works and to crack the protections. Systems are so complex these days that a loosely-knit group of unpaid hackers might not be able to make a strong result anymore.
Recently? PCSX2 is at least 11 years old at this point.
Not really. The PS4 and XBone are essentially fancy x86_64 computers with a small form factor. While the hardware is not exactly COTS it's much closer than the last generation's PPC cores. To emulate an XBox 360 you need to emulate an entire processor etc. To emulate an XBox One you can get away with virtualizing certain components. It should be closer to Wine than to PSEmu.
Easy? No, not by any measure. But vastly easier than the last generation.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
well, they reckon that since it's x86 it's like superduper easy.
of course it is not. when xbox1 was selling back in the day the best I think they managed was stuff like booting the halo title screen...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Exclusives
Not really. The PS4 and XBone are essentially fancy x86_64 computers with a small form factor.
And the original Xbox was an x86 as well. Didn't necessarily make it easy as the OS had to be reversed engineered tobe emulated.
...the PS3 and the XBox 360 for the PS4 and XBox One respectively?
Lack of backwards compatibility in this day and age is pretty lame.
I'm aware of the testing issues involved, and frankly I think if you provided a backwards compatibility platform that was extensible by the game companies themselves (i.e. they could patch the game to run inside the VM without Micro$oft or $ony being involved) at least you'd make things better...
Loading...
It should of created a $99 ad-on, that would allow the Xbox One to play 360 games. Essentially, all it would be is an Xbox 360 processing core, which would use the already available hard drive, controllers, I/O, and Kinect 2.
I'd wager it'd sell like hot cakes, and be profitable. Because the entire Xbox 360 is now what $150-$200? Minus case, controllers, hard drive, all output components, they should of been able to pull it off.
But how long did it take to build a working Xbox emulator?
PS2 emulation in PCSX2 was pretty stable for a long time now (Total Games: 2420 Playable: 1946 (80.41%)) and works reasonably fast on 5 year old PC.
Now XB360 and PS3 are tall order, what with the need to emulate custom PowerPC and Cell chips clocked as fast as any modern PC CPU.
XBOne and PS4 are easy compared to those - they've got run-of-the-mill x86 CPUs (easy to virtualise) with run-of-the-mill GPUs, in case of XBOne even with run-of-the-mill DirectX APIs, AFAIK.
Games, both downloaded and on optical media, are likely to be encrypted eight ways to Sunday on modern systems. Before you can even begin to emulate games from a modern console, you need the unencrypted binaries, or you need to resign yourself to running community-developed homebrew. This means extracting the console key from a console, which is not likely to be a trivial matter.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Thank goodness you correctly prioritized between "getting first post" and "saying something remotely useful, or at least not stupid".
Are there going to be games worth emulating? Or are we already talking about emulating the next Philips CD-i so we can play Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon on our PCs?
Thank goodness, you recovered from your moronic first post to add even more brain dead twaddle and ignorant speculation to a reply in your own thread.
Fucking retard.
Barely even a proper *SNES* emulator. PlayStation/Saturn ones are not anywhere near decent. How the hell do they expect to emulate a just-released-gen console? Are they high on LSD mixed with crack cocaine?
The games are encrypted, the OS is encrypted, can't even start writing an emulator without the code to run.
(Because of all that, I was able to port POSE to Android.)
Admittedly, the ROM images are copyrighted, but that's not the same thing as the emulator itself. Same thing for the game machine emulators like MAME and such.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I'm not emulator writer, nor am I an x86 expert, but I'm pretty skeptical about this. If there are any experts out there, feel free to chime in.
The original XBox had a custom Pentium 3 processor clocked at 733Mhz, and to date there haven't been any reasonable emulators for it. There have been a few attempts, but no big successes have been made. Last I checked about 6 months ago, interest was also waning on the development of it.You would think a quad core i7 clocked at 3.2 GHz would run circles around that custom P3, at least fast enough to get the low-level system instructions handled.
The XBox 360 has a custom PowerPC Xenon, and the PS3 has the cell processor. Both are a PPC architecture, which given the clock speeds and variance in instruction set are probably pretty hard to emulate.
With the XB1 and PS4 both running on x86 hardware, we are now beyond the point of consoles being custom hardware (NES on up to Gamecube, PS1-PS3) with custom software, and that barrier for multi-platform release is really just down to contracting. I'd also be interested in seeing what can be done with the XB1 or PS4 software without the MS and Sony imposed restrictions, such as the XBLive profanity blocking. Hell, I may even buy one of my favorite games (Killer Instinct), as long as I'm not subjected to MS monitoring and policing my swearing at friends during our own tournament.
The Emotion Engine chip is apparently difficult to emulate in software.
Sure, but it's been a usable emulator for more than 5 years or so.
Does your newsletter contain tips for setting up a HOSTS file? If so, please accept my subscription to your periodical.
Games will be the hardest thing about emulation. While I don't doubt that emulating the hardware can eventually be done, getting the games will be harder. Also, legally, emulating hardware could fall under exceptions like reverse engineering whereas copyright law would make games harder.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Yea Wine was a real easy project that just came out in no time at all.
Now even today Wine isn't used as a Windows Emulator/Replacement. But for a few targeted applications that you need to work with. If you have mostly windows apps, then you will be using Windows for better usage.
But I remember Wine back in the late 90's. It took a long time to get working and there is still a lot of work to go.
For the most part, people have switched to visualizing Windows in Linux as things work nearly 100%.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Another console release, another sea of TRASH technical journalism. Here's a question... why was there NEVER a Xbox (original) emulator, when the hardware had a PC CPU (standard Intel x86 chip) and a PC GPU (near standard Nvidia GPU chip), tiny amount of RAM, and was significantly less powerful than gaming PCs after a few years?
Emulators are NOT what the common sheeple are encouraged to think they are. The MAIN fact to consider when it comes to console emulators is the "WHY" they come to exist in the first place.
-console emulators (at least the ones being considered here) are NOT commercial products, but the work of enthusiasts.
-enthusiast coding happens for many reasons, and these reasons frequently FAIL to overlap with those that drive commercial coding
-a MAJOR factor driving original emulation efforts was the fascination with emulating console HARDWARE units (CPU and GPU) in software. This intellectual challenge is rendered DULL indeed when one is 'emulating' PC-like hardware with PC hardware.
-a MAJOR factor driving original emulation efforts was that console games were VERY different from those available on PCs. Today, the AAA console games usually exist in much BETTER forms on the PC. Where the publisher refuses to release a PC version (say with Halo beyond 2, or Gear of War beyond the first) PC gamers consider the missing games as inferior trash for console heads.
-the games that PC users would love to play (eg., Red Dead Redemption, or Last of Us) are known to be so "to the metal" that such games would run very poorly indeed on an emulator. In other words, the types of games that an emulator would run well today are not the games PC owners care about.
Hence, this subject is just another for TRASH technical journalists to fill this week's column inches with. People in the Emulator community KNOW that there is hardware likely to get some form of semi-decent emulation, and hardware that will NEVER be usefully emulated. Nintendo and hand-helds are where emulation hopes remain.
NO-ONE in the emulator community expects any sensible, useful progress to be made emulating the PS3, PS4, or Xbox One for running games anyone cares about.
FSVO "usable" depending on what game and how popular it is. (Disclaimer: This information is ~ 1.5 years old. YMMV)
The big problem with PCSX2 is that it was written with only two threads, and then cpu growth went horizontal (more cores) instead of keeping vertical (faster cores), so if it's not a popular game that gets its own tweaks (Final Fantasy anything, Persona, etc) you can be using a major beefy box that could run Skyrim on "ultra" while running a Xubuntu VM, and you're still going to have a bad time trying to play the original Ratchet and Clank.
Of course, rewriting the thing would be a massive undertaking, so I kind of gave up on watching it. Sad, really, considering the awesome library of PS2 games out there.
I think some people here are missing the point.
I don't think anyone is saying that PS4/Xbox1 emulation will be easy. Just that it will be easier than PS3/XBox360 emulation.
Both generations will have a significant amount of hacking and reverse engineering involved and will be fraught with legal challenges. The current generation just has the advantage of being more or less based on hardware that's readily available at a reasonable price. The previous generation is not even remotely similar to anything you can buy easily or cheaply. (Other than the PS3 and XBox360, of course.)
Usually reliable emulators don't come out until about two generations after a console. So by the end of the XBone/PS4 era we should start seeing good 360/PS3 emulators coming out.
Its Called a PC
The first Xbox had very similar hardware to a PC, but Xbox emulation got a lot less attention than PS2 or even Gamecube/Wii emulation. Why?
Um, no....
Not really, some computers, really powerful computers (about the same as playing the most intensive computer game on the absolutely highest graphics possible), can play a few of these games without huge game wrecking glitches. At best I would call the emulator a very early alpha; Proof of concept.
And we still do not even have something even that good for the original Xbox. The only reason we have something that is even decent at emulating the PS2 is because it is far older than even the Xbox and by far the most popular console of all time. And really that is only like 50%. Very popular games have been made to work, but you can pretty much forget just getting some random PS2 game popping it in and playing it.
Which is not to say that the current gen will not be easier to emulate, but that is a lot of power to be emulating even if it is already basically 99% a normal PC already.
The N64 was probably the last decently complete emulator, and you have to go all the way back to the SNES era to get one that is 100% working, every game works, launch and go.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
There's no doubt that the PS4 and Xbone will be jailbroken. Probably quite quickly - they ARE x86 units after all. They really are really fancy derivatives of the original Xbox, and that thing was cracked 10 ways to sunday.
Hell, it might be preferable to have a launch unit where it's easily hacked than a later model where the hacks are far less available and definitely not soft-moddable.
In this day and age with so many games already ported to PC, what is even the point of this, other than the "because I can" mantra?
Sure, makes sense for older hardware, but I don't see the point for modern stuff.
Yep, locked down tighter than my ex-girlfriend's asshole. Which is why she's my ex-girlfriend. And also why I bought a PS4, since I'm not getting any more snatch.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The PCSX2 developers said a PS3 emulator will be possible around 2020...so good luck with a PS4 emulator.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
So, how are you going to emulate the ESRAM of the Xbox One on a standard PC? Or the high-bandwidth GDDR5 unified memory of the PS4?
Mada mada dane.
...that these companies haven't looked into building such emulators themselves? Perhaps as part of a back-compatibility solution? Perhaps it's not that easy, perhaps there are legal issues and push-back from game studios? There's more to "emulating" that just running some CPU code, and a console is a very integrated piece of hardware/software, where users expect realtime experience.
The picture is much more complex than you're making it out to be.
Not the whole OS, just certain API calls. This gen will be much more complicated, but the process will remain the same.
I wouldn't be surprised if the emulators start borrowing code from WINE and ReactOS to get the job done.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
If you have mostly windows apps, then you will be using Windows for better usage.
Some games work perfectly well under wine and that means they work better (faster) than running them in VirtualBox or VMWare. Also a nice feature of wine is having multiple separate windows "installations" with different OS settings and isolated programs (also easy to clean up, just create a new wineroot directory).
Your information is severely out of date.
Yeah, the hard part isn't the processor, the majority (if not all) consoles have very well documented processors, so as far as accuracy goes, the processor was never really a problem.
GPUs and the way everything connects, on the other hand...
skyrim? Isn't that something you do when joining the mile high club?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I mean, sure, there was a lot of effort and money spent on making and designing the consoles, but for these two companies, typically they take a loss on the hardware, then expect to recoup the money on software sales. It sure seems like they could spend (a little?) time developing an emulator, then sell it for a nominal fee, and have some program tell you if your computer is good enough/incompatible/questionable, and that should generate more software sales (which, as mentioned, is how they're really getting paid anyway)
So, why not treat their systems as more of a platform, rather than just a hunk of hardware?
*smirk* And before the XBox, they demoed Halo on a Mac... :)
You could say the same thing about the original Xbox. It's essentially a PIII with an nVidia GPU and a custom version of Win2K. Still no decent emulator.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
OMG, that could cost me .. *shudder* .. sixty dollars! That's almost as much as a whole new game, and an entire ten percent of the cost of a newest-generation console!
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
...because it had been developed on Macs. Halo was mostly finished when MS borged Bungie.
0 1 - just my two bits
To be fair. even Sony's own PS2 emulator (the one used in 80 gig PS3s) can't handle Ratchet and Clank.
That always amazed me. It's a top-name first-party franchise, and the software-emulation PS3s couldn't handle it.
As for emulating the PS4/Xbox One, pfft.
People said the same thing about the original Xbox, and none of the emulators for that are worth a damn.
With slower regular ram?
If you can't even imagine it, you will never pull it off!
Different use cases. Palm didn't care because nobody was going to carry around a PC to emulate a handheld device. The utility of a PDA was as much in its form factor as anything else. Not so for game consoles.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
*Was* difficult. PCSX2 is damn near flawless. I can run most PS2 games on my Sandy Bridge i7 at full speed in 1080p with advanced pixel shader effects, including God of War and Shadow of the Colossus. There is even a PS3 emulator in the works that already runs homebrew stuff.
Xbone and PS4 "emulators" should be easier to create since they won't need to be emulated, just virtualized.
Schroedinghole
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Assertion 1:
“I don’t think it’s been the case that an emulator has been written
without there first being some hardware hacks on the system such
that people could put mod chips in and run homebrew.”
Reply 1:
A hardware hack is not required to clone a computer in software...
it is but one of many tools that may be used.
Assertion 2:
"Even creating an emulator could potentially be illegal"
Reply 2:
Everything is potentially illegal. An emulator is less
encumbered with legalities than the thing it emulates. This
means that You are more likely to be harmed by the real thing.
Note that only an incomplete emulator doesn't emulate the lack
of a ROM (or different ROM) in the same way as the original
hardware.
Assertion 3:
"While it (emulation) exists in murky legal waters..."
Reply 3:
Untrue.
It is the lawyers wish that emulation exist in murky legal waters.
However, it is the 'lawyers wish' which exists in murky legal waters
because FUD (fear uncertainty doubt) is their only il/legal recourse.
That's the biggest problem. The games full expect the texture data is already in memory because of the unified memory architecture. On a PC, while you could run the CPU very slowly and inefficiently on the GPU memory, you don't have 8GB of GPU memory to play with.
So there need to be a lot of memory shuffling going on, but unfortunately that is like rewriting the game engine. Might as well wait for the console games to be ported by the publishers.
Back in the day I played around with CXBX because I didn't want to buy an XBOX. It was more of a research project, but it proved it could be done. What it actually did was turn XBOX executables into Windows executables, with call redirection. It was a very cool idea but by the time it was working, no one was playing XBOX games anymore.
I would imagine it would be significantly harder with the XB1, but still very possible considering the architecture.
Apparently the project lives on and is pretty compatible with many games, today: http://www.caustik.com/cxbx/
Both consoles are built to a familiar PC architecture, I can see an xbone one emulator working alright, as the only major hurdle to overcome is emulating the way the eSRAM works. I don't see how software emulation could emulate the GDDR5 RAM in the PS4 though, unless the machine emulating itself has very high bandwidth memory.
Xbox has the problem of having fuck all for exclusives that stayed exclusive, so the demand just isn't there. Plus you had years and years of "not a real emulator" e-dong wars whenever people tried just writing a wrapper for the system's quirks and running the x86 code natively.
The first rule about Wine is, Wine Is Not an Emulator
There's nothing "questionable" about it. It is clearly illegal, piracy, to download a copy of the game. I do not claim to have never done it, either.
So all the games play like crap?
First you need to understand what the "program" in "programming" means, and we can move from there...
The Retrode is a brilliant little gadget: http://www.retrode.com/
It's basically an old-school console cartridge -> USB adaptor. It also supports old Megadrive / SNES gamepads and doesn't require host software (which is actually rather neat - it'll appear as a USB mass storage device with a cartridge image on it, plus presenting the controllers as either gamepads or keyboards). With further adapters you can plug in Mastersystem, Gameboy and N64 carts (plus two N64 controllers).
It's just a really nice piece of work. I use it to rip my cartridges, just like I rip CDs, then put them into whatever emulator I like. Avoids the legally dubious websites, etc. I can imagine there might be grey areas in some emulation stuff still (e.g. some emulators need a BIOS image, which someone has to have dumped from the console) but that's only for certain consoles - and at least you don't have to go on dodgy websites to download the games you already own.
The PS4/XB1 will remain the same spec, while PC hardware advances... Before too long it won't be very difficult at all.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Im guessing xbone is probably running something based on Winders 8, but if the ps4 is running a unix thing, then it should be easy to implement the necicary api calls into current linux/bsd computers.
Hey, maybe this generation will be the generation for running ps4 games on linux.
Emulating a piece of hardware with another piece of hardware in software is always slow. I remember when you needed a fairly beefy PC to play emulated NES games effectively. If you think that emulating a current console on a PC will never be practical, given that they are essentially just PC's themselves now, then you attention span is too short to have bothered reading this far into my comment, so I'm not entirely sure why I bothered.
I know - Steve Jobs had them on the stage demoing it, remember? I wonder what would have happened if Apple had bought Bungie instead. How many more Macs would Apple have sold back in y2k and would it have improved their market share any.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzrme9yWens
Yeah but that is usually due to custom chips and different architectures.
With everything now on X86 it becomes stupidly easy. Just certain APIs need to be rewritten so they don't need the exact hardware config.
Halo was suppose to be a Real Time Strategy game when MS bought them. That's not "mostly finished."
Well while the consoles are stuck in the past with 5 year old hardware and using gddr5 which is like 8 years old as well. PC will be ripping it up with gddr6 in 2014 also ddr4 in 2014. So yea even a low budget machine next year will wipe the floor with the consoles. That is how you noon.
It sounds like you weren't interested in snatch, anyway.
The original XBOX used an off the shelf Celeron processor that we easily run circles around today, and an nVidia chip that was somewhat custom, but not so far out there we can't work around it, not to mention a customized version of Windows as a front end.
Last time I checked only the original Halo worked on anything else with emulation. The original XBOX should be among the easiest things to emulate all things considered.
I don't put much stock in X86 = guaranteed emulation at all.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
They are not "essentially just PCs". Only morons who know nothing of their architecture would say that. Just because the CPU is an x86 chip does not make something a PC.
console builders' absolute refusal to see emulation as even remotely legal
Wrong. The Wii, Wii U, PS3, and Xbox 360 all run emulators for various downloadable games, and it will be no different with the Xbox One and PS4. The Xbox 360 also has an Xbox emulator for those who buy the hard drive add on.
Twinstiq, game news
Some games work perfectly well under wine
Only some? Scroll down to the wine section here. I'd say (as of the last year or so) most Windows games work under wine. I've even purchased titles at launch such as Dead Island Riptide and played them under wine right away without issue. It's compatibility has been getting amazingly good.
It's also handy in bypassing certain DRM restrictions such as install limits. Install to a wine prefix, tar it up and back it up. Just untar when you want to "reinstall" it again.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
Right, because neither of those things are ever coming to desktop systems. Oh, wait, they are. Sorry, I almost didn't notice that you're a fucking dimwit.
I just tried GT4 on it the other day and it's fairly buggy. Letters from menu items missing unless I manually enable some emulation clipping hacks, the ghost cars don't work at all, and the audio engine has popping noises fairly regularly. It's playable, but not even close to flawless.
I was under the impression Wine only did DX9c and that DX10+ was a work in progress.
They are essentially just locked down PCs. They're tuned for memory bandwidth, but the fundamental architecture is largely the same.
+1, Informative
To be fair. even Sony's own PS2 emulator (the one used in 80 gig PS3s) can't handle Ratchet and Clank.
That always amazed me. It's a top-name first-party franchise, and the software-emulation PS3s couldn't handle it.
Probably uses some tricks that break the TRC's. Some PSone games don't work (X-Files, I'm looking at you) in PS2's or PS3's and those PS2's have PSone hardware in them.
You might also want to compare the sound of the PSN download version of FF7 to the disc version on a PS3 sometime. Only the PSN version sounds like it did on an actual PSone or PS2.
PCSX2 is NOT flawless, though emulator fanboys claim it is. It is nowhere near as good at playing PS2 games as an actual PS2 (or PS3 for that matter) is. Sure, it's better than it was...at one time the only game that ran well on it was Final Fantasy X.
I do believe that impression is correct, DX9 only.
I thought Microsoft's plan was to have windows on everything - phone, tablet, xbone, etc
They're tuned for memory bandwidth, but the fundamental architecture is largely the same.
So basically you are ignorant of the architecture. There is more than just "tuning for memory bandwidth". They use customized GPUs cores with much higher amounts of VRAM, they use specialized DSPs that would have to be emulated, they have specialized memory buses, they have customized game OSes, etc. The architecture is not "largely" the same except at the most highest level in that they have a CPU, GPU and main memory. All the pieces I mention that you gloss over all are huge issues when trying to emulate the systems.
If being "largely the same" made it easy to emulate, how do you explain that the only original Xbox emulators out there all suck? Especially when it was far closer to a vanilla PC than either an Xbone or PS4.
WINE is not an emulator. Literally.
I wonder if there will be need for an full blown emulator(i.e. emulate everything down to the CPU) or a VM would suffice for this generation.
Personally I'd rather Sony swallowed that ego and release Orbis(the name of the BSD based OS on the playstation consoles) images for PCs. Most of their money is made by selling the software and services. Letting PC users install their OS and buy their games will expand their userbase at little to no cost. At least release some AMD based Vaios that can dual boot between Orbis and Windows.
I never claimed that WINE was an emulator, but that doesn't mean its codebase couldn't be used as a starting point for an Xbox One emulator. The whole OS doesn't need to be emulated necessarily, just the parts of the OS that the software hooks into. Then again, if the emulator is high-level enough then the actual OS itself could run on it, though this would be a copyright nightmare but nothing new for emulators (BIOS files for PSX, Dreamcast, etc. being prime examples).
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
If emulating a handheld is so hard, emulating a console would be much harder.
This isn't the Bleem days anymore :D
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
i was gonna say something to this but the newsletter would only let me post on twitter or facebook, lets see if i can dig it up ...
yea yea, the article is the-quest-to-build- somewhere on slashdodt and i was gonna say 'fuck legal, team satoshi didnt give a shit about legal obviously and now they're making law by abscence. Fuck unhackable, thats not possible. If you're the man, just do it, if you're scared, just dont take credit.' but it will only let me post on twitter or Facebook ? the decline of slashdot ?
good thing i put it somewhere, yea sure, if you can, why dont you, you dont have to put your name on it, you just post it on a few fora and put up a torrent through a vpn, put it on filesomething.com and 'the community' will surely take it up if it's worthwhile
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?