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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
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
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.
Learning about brewing beer, by brewing beer.
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.
Since the original Xbox was running mostly off the shelf hardware, I'm not sure it needs an emulator (aside from whatever security/copy protection hardware).
But the 360/PS3 is going to be tough. Tougher than average, I'd say since those were both custom CPUs. Yes, there is some papers out there covering how they did their execution but that doesn't cover some of the weird stuff. Stuff like with the PS2 and original PS that took years to sort out.
Those of you who don't remember the Bleem! saga and the fact that Sony not only lawsuited them to death, but also make emulation even harder by changing the way their compilers did certain undocumented graphic blits and other memory tricks. This was why Bleem! had a specific target list of compatible games.
Still not sure that all of that was documented.
Bad memories.
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)
Exclusives
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
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.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
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.)
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.
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
Preservation? The work that went into building emulators of old has meant that we can now play SNES games et all on modern hardware - such as Android tablets. I have no idea what the computing landscape will look like in 10 or 20 years time but it'd be nice to be able to play today's games on whatever hardware I own at the time without having to dust off the PS4 or whatever.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
pSX and ePSXe (and PCSX and many others) are PS1 emulators, not PS2.
The only working PS2 emulator I know of is PCSX2.
Mada mada dane.
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.
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
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:
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
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/
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!