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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."
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
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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.
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.
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Move on.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Not necessarily. The only reason that's been an issue in the past, was because our computers had to significantly out-strip the machine being emulated. What's being suggested here, however, is not an emulator so much as a conditioned environment for execution, not unlike Wine.
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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...
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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.
It's not questionable, it's illegal. Ask the copyright holders.
If a individual has a question about legality, I'd say the first person they ask should probably be a lawyer or a judge, not some private business entity with a vested interest in giving a particular answer.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The copyright holders of the emulator would be the authors of the emulator. Now if they used original code instead of a clean-room reimplementation, they'd certainly be in trouble, but if they manage to do a clean-room implementation, the legality isn't as clear-cut. Note that they do not need to implement the DRM functionality because they have no reason to prevent games from running, so they wouldn't have to fear anything from that side. Problems might arise from software patents, of course.
The questionable part might be that if the games come with an EULA that they may only be played on the original console, then those writing the emulator might be accused of contributory infringement because they create software (namely the emulator) which enables people to violate that EULA.
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.
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.
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While some might think it is a grand conspiracy by Sony and MS not to have backwards compatibility, it really is a question of cost. Xbox 360 and PS3 had much different chip architecture than x86. It is possible that Sony and MS could have developed adequate chips, but it would have been top of the line CPUs. That would add significant cost to the console possibly adding $100-150 to the base model. Also the chips would have required much more cooling than the current designs.
How Sony and MS did it in the last generation was not rocket science. Those chips were significantly better than the previous generation as chips in general were following Moore's Law. These days, significant performance gains are not without a great deal of cost.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
(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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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
This isn't really true, thanks to the miracle of dynamic binary translation.
Programs like QEMU don't emulate each instruction at run time, which is painfully slow as you suggest. Rather, when when instructions from the source architecture, you simply translate that into machine code of the target architecture. It can be challenging of course to map differences between registers, memory layouts, etc... But you have to do those things anyway to emulate.
There is not hard and fast rule saying that an emulator must be an order of magnitude more powerful than the source machine. The operating system in this case is much more difficult to reverse engineer than the hardware.
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.
Just about every platform ever made has supplied people with a dev kit which, almost universally, contains some kind of emulator.
How the hell do you write a launch title, for instance, when the console only exists in prototype versions?
They are expensive, complex, powerful, and - many of them - are just PC-based emulation environments with some custom hardware to interface with controllers, cartridges, etc.
There's nothing new in emulating anything. People were doing it back in the days of PC-based NES development kits. Almost certainly, the devkits for the new consoles are out there now, PC-based, very hard to get hold of, very expensive, and very well protected so you can't just pirate them and give everyone a free console.
But the way the world of console gaming is heading (SteamBox etc.), it may not matter for much longer anyway.
There is nothing more to "emulation" than pretending to be another type of machine. And if you made the machine, the only advantage you have is that you know what the hardware is supposed to do. If you didn't make the machine, it's the REVERSE-ENGINEERING that's complex and difficult and takes years, not the emulation.
*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.
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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!
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...because it had been developed on Macs. Halo was mostly finished when MS borged Bungie.
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Emulation is perfectly legal. If you own a copy of the game, you are permitted to format shift it for the purposes of compatibility. From the US Copyright Act Section 117:
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Wrong. If properly reverse-engineered, it is not at all questionable, it is legal. If it were not, all personal computers would be made by IBM, and they would have sued Compaq out of existence for reverse engineering their bios and making the first "PC Clone".
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.
I remember working being done a GBA emulator before that system even came out and Nintendo DS Emulators were also around while the system was in its prime. Same goes for the Wii (which was a really pleasant surprise at the time).
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.
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"Barely even a proper *SNES* emulator".
Not true. Take a look a bsnes (now merged into hijan). It's a cycle accurate SNES emulator with 100% compatibility. Currently a similar emulator but for N64 is being made called CEN64 (still in early development at the moment).
Schroedinghole
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
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/
Indeed. And if you go that route, what you'll find is that emulators are a-ok as far as the court was concerned. I actually had a copy of Connectix Virtual Game Station back in the day and used it to play my PS1 games on my Mac. Sony sued them, lost in court, and then decided it was better to simply buy them out and kill the product than deal with the threat of having them around.
One thing to note: Connectix reverse-engineered all of the key software for the PS1, so their product contained none of Sony's proprietary property, such as BIOS files. That's a large part of why it was ruled to be okay. In contrast, most of the open-source emulators I see these days require that you provide your own copy of the BIOS, since they haven't gone through the effort of reverse-engineering it. While the emulators themselves may be fine, the fact that they rely on an illicit use of a copyrighted piece of software in order to operate suggests that there's at least something about this whole process that isn't kosher.
So all the games play like crap?
Yes - this helps.
What helps even further is the differences between "old" and "new" style coding. No longer do engineers have to go looking for that "1 crazy hack" - that register bit - undocumented, left alone - it gave me 4 MORE PIXELS ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE DISPLAY!... What happens if I take all the $76's out of the framebuffer - crickey! 40 column text... what if... and so on.
These guys write to specs - DX, OGL - probably with a metric shit ton of "insider info" and plenty of extensions - but that can be reverse-engineered out. Posix, WinNT interface - it's all there - mostly public. Mostly these guys develop on PCs.
Getting faithful reproductions of something that outputs 24 bit RGB data over HDMI (and therefore obeys their rules) is many orders of magnitude easier than, say, getting pixel perfect output of a SNES or GBA - a system in which the programmer can hack and bash almost anything at clock cycle accuracy. That concept has vanished too (it just isn't easy to count cycles anymore)
It is unlikely one will need to emulate a BONE at GPU transistor level (or even just plain old bus level). Instead one says "this is mostly going to be DX - let's see what is added/changed". Of course the ideal machine to emulate that on is one with a DX$version graphics card.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
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.
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While some might think it is a grand conspiracy by Sony and MS not to have backwards compatibility, it really is a question of cost.
well ... the incentive to re-buy games, or buy a new release of an existing game, is much less if the previous-gen / version of the game you already own runs on your new console. not to mention the temptation to pick up previous gen games from the bargain bin.
maybe it was a issue of cost, but i doubt too much time was spent crying over it.
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
an emulator is almost certainly not illegal. Now the 95% of people who use emulators to play games they have not purchased are clear cut illegal. Playing games you own on a platform they were not designed for is a grey area (One I would say morally shouldn't be, but legally it's a grey area, however it basically has precidence protecting it, dating back at least as far as the start of MP3 players).
What about if you purchased copies of the games, and played them on an emulator instead of buying the official hardware?
Not only would this not be piracy, but the console manufacturer would benefit because the hardware itself is usually sold at a loss, and the user would benefit as they could use hardware they already own instead of purchasing extra hardware solely for playing games.
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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.
Well let's all be honest here. Obviously an emulator is possible considering they used an emulator running on a pc that had titans in it during the reveal of the xbox one to showcase the next gen games running 1080p @ 60fps. Then they pulled the old switcharoo knocking it back to 720p for the final product.
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.
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Don't these new games have DRM to prevent emulators or cloned/hacked machines?
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
You never heard of Nintendo's virtual console emulator?
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!
Anyone savvy enough to create an artificial Xbox One in software isn't going to be stopped by any DRM measure.
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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.
Don't PC games have DRM to prevent piracy? It's not bulletproof.
+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.
Worked for early PS3's too, except it ups the cost. And what is one of the big complaints of the masses about the PS3? The cost of the launch models with backwards compatibility.
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 ?