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RPCS3 – Open Source Playstation 3 Emulator
- mouse_ 3y agogood project. Much better than PCSX2.
- mnd999 3y agoPCSX2 can run Burnout 3 though. What else do you need? But this is seriously impressive. Modern Vintage Gamer has done some nice YouTube videos on it.
- AdammadA 3y agoStenzek who created the duckstation emulator moved over to PCSX2 and the updates from him and others have made that emulator really impressive in my humble opinion. It just seems a bit odd to make a comparison like this. Is there something i'm missing as to why you would compare either?
- mijoharas 3y agoThat sounds interesting, and I've enjoyed reading the deep dives into dolphin emulation. Could you share a link to these?
- AdammadA 3y agoIts basically changelog notes with each update to the emulator ( usually daily ) and has been very active in recent years. You can also find a wealth of information and upates of various computer and console emulators on reddit r/emulation and that'll have what i think you are looking for.
- DoItToMe81 3y agoI'd agree with you a few years ago, but PCSX2 has made leaps and bounds since then. It's quite good now, maybe one of the best.
- atahanacar 3y agoFor some reason, I am very fascinated by the architecture of PS3. Its complexity makes RPCS3 the most impressive emulator in my eyes. Though to be fair, all emulators are impressive one way or another.
- zirgs 3y agoThe architecture is unnecessarily complicated and it turned out to be dead end. Which is why SONY dropped it and now uses x86 like everyone else.
- opan 3y agoEverything from this generation (PS3's Cell included) was some sort of PowerPC, many previous gens also had consoles using PPC or MIPS. Sony and MS went x86 during the same generation (PS4 and Xbox One). Nintendo went from PPC to ARM (though arguably they'd already used ARM for a while because of their handheld stuff).
- ericlewis 3y agoOG Xbox was x86 and was released similar time as PS2. Then they went PPC for 360. And now back to x86.
- fluoridation 3y agoI believe the GP is referring to the entire computer architecture, not the instruction set architecture. I seem to recall that it had three distinct heterogenous processors that had to be coordinated to get the most out of the system, so porting from, say, PC to PS5 wasn't necessarily straightforward, without leaving performance on the table.
- ChoGGi 3y agoThe xbox 360 was the one with the triple CPU, PS3 had the odd combo of one "main" CPU and 7 auxiliary ones.
- Al0neStar 3y agoThis CPU tier list by the r/rpcs3 sub should be helpful (specifically the "What do i buy" tab) : https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1Rpq_2D4Rf3g6O-x2R1fwTSKWvJH7X63kExsVxHnT2Mc/htmlview?pli=1#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1Rpq_2D4Rf3g6O-x2...
- arghwhat 3y agoLacks 7000 series Ryzen...
- dataflow360 3y agoNo mentions of Apple Silicon, and a quick Googling didn't reveal much. Anyone have insight or experience? Asking for an M1 Max 64GB ;)
- smcl 3y agoYou could just try it out and document your experience somewhere
- Shekelphile 3y agoI haven't looked at RPCS3's codebase in quite a few years at this point but when I last did there was still a bunch of x86 specific stuff that prevents it from being buildable for aarch, if it compiles and runs at all you will be stuck with having to use rosetta and moltenvk translation layers so performance is gonna suck.
- Al0neStar 3y agoAccording to this video, setting it up and running the games shouldn't be a bottleneck, but performance isn't going to be very good. He's using the M2 pro and you can still see/feel the slowdown. https://youtu.be/YnDAkZLXkPA?t=603 https://youtu.be/YnDAkZLXkPA?t=603
- adhvaryu 3y agoSlightly unrelated but emulators have been a big part of my childhood because I grew up in a country where a PlayStation was unaffordable for the middle class and Nintendo simply didn't sell their consoles there. Luckily emulation has always been legal thanks to a case 2 decades ago [1]. I see it as one of the "big wins" of the (US) judiciary because it has made the lives of many children joyous, across the globe. Plenty of old games on now obsolete platforms can still be enjoyed thanks to emulation. I hope the precedent never goes away. [1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/02/biztech/articles/11sony.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/...
- Narishma 3y agoDoesn't that case only apply in the USA?
- leehuffman 3y agoWho cares? This person is telling a story about their lack of access to cool new tech, and what projects like this one have provided them. Split hairs all you want but giving less privileged people access to funsies that eventually turn to deeper technical interest and (I assume) a higher earning career is the overarching message and I’m all the way about that. The weird dissection of an uplifting & cool comment like OPs is classic HN & definitely unnecessary. Edit: And their reply resonates with me. Not fronting like I couldn’t have those things, but I dug deep into retro gaming (via emulation) in my early teens and my career can be traced back to that original interest & deep diving.
- Narishma 3y agoI just fail to see how a court decision in the US would have any effect on another country. It's not like OP's situation and access to emulators would have been any different if the decision went Sony's way.
- leehuffman 3y ago
- jl6 3y agoAm I right in thinking that the PS4 and Xbox One (and later) consoles and should be easier to emulate by virtue of being based on a more standard x86 architecture?
- tourmalinetaco 3y agoYes, in fact the PS4 is beginning to see HLE with various emulators, most notably fpPS4 (free pascal PS4). https://github.com/red-prig/fpPS4 https://github.com/red-prig/fpPS4
- djxfade 3y agoPerhaps, but not necessarily. The original Xbox was based on mostly off the shelf PC hardware of its early, Intel Celeron, standard motherboard architecture (mostly), Nvidia GPU, and regular IDE hdd. But it's only in the past few years we have begun to see working emulators.
- als0 3y agoI’ve always wondered whether that was because of technical challenges or just lack of interest. After all, nearly all games on Xbox were available either on PC or other consoles. I can remember a few exclusives like Blinx, Conker, Far Cry Instincts…
- Shekelphile 3y ago100% lack of interest. There's been like 5 people total in the og xbox emu scene in the last 10 years, one of them didn't even do any actual work besides getting mad in reddit comments (jayfoxrox) and another put all his effort into working on an hle/binary translation emulator which by definition cannot work with half the library of games as xbox api and dx api calls are inlined in those games.
- MegaDeKay 3y agoMatt really saved the day when he started up xemu from xqemu. It was advancing by leaps and bounds there for a while but has slowed down once again over the last year. I'm hoping it picks up steam once again.
- dottjt 3y agoThe fact they managed to achieve this astounds me. I grew up with the PS3 as a teenager, and I just remember being told how complex the architecture was, as well as just how powerful the system was. Keep in mind, the US Air force connected 1000+ of these together for super computing purposes. ...and now a large part of it has been emulated to a high degree and it kind of blows my mind. Will be crazy to think that the ps5 will likely be emulated on a computer within the next 20 years; perhaps easier so because of the simpler architecture.
- Wingy 3y agoThe PS5 is already emulated on computers today to some degree. Kyty doesn’t run any commercial PS5 games but it can run some homebrew PS5 apps.
- kevincox 3y agoThe PS5 is basically a regular old desktop computer. The PS3 has a quite unique multi-"cell" architecture.
- hypercube33 3y agoPS5 and Xbox SX are AMD Ryzen 4000 series x86 and a GPU slapped on a die with some memory so emulation isnt so far off
- dagmx 3y agoThe original Xbox proved that hardware similarity doesn’t necessarily make emulation easy. It took a long while for OG Xbox emulation to be decent , and that was with it using fairly commodity hardware and a very DirectX api. The PS5 has custom APIs that would need to be reversed out, especially graphics APIs. It also has a large-ish pool of shared memory that makes it difficult to map to most PCs which don’t have that setup. There’s several custom hardware blocks for bespoke decompression that are routinely used and the equivalent to direct storage to speed up resource access. It’s not impossible to port those games over as has been seen, but it’s also not easy to emulate that if the specific game builds make use of those features (and many many games do)
- mateuszf 3y agoI'm wondering - heard that PS3 architecture is so complex, and PS4 is back to x86 - so what is it that makes PS4 emulators so hard to implement? Surely nowadays hardware such as 7000 ryzen series and 4090 gpus are leaps and bounds above PS4 hardware.
- pushedx 3y agoHaving very briefly looked into this problem a few years ago, my impression of the primary challenge was that of re-implementing a large OS API surface in a non-infringing way.
- mateuszf 3y agoLooking how some emulators just ask users to copy firmware / software / keys from their real consoles - couldn't the same thing be done and only the hardware layer be emulated?
- philistine 3y agoHow do you get that software out of your console ?
- mateuszf 3y agoNo idea, that's why I'm asking :) I guess there may be ways to do it not really legally by some hacker and then sharing it with others. Not that I support it, but there are still people who don't see problems with such behavior.
- bsagdiyev 3y agorpcs3 just uses the PS3s update pup files to install the OS so I imagine there might be a way for newer consoles like that. You can obtain the PS3 ones directly from Sony for use on a flash drive to update the console.
- dagmx 3y agoThe PS4 has its own graphics API called GNM and GNMx that would need to be reverse engineered and ported. It also has shared memory between the CPU and GPU that are harder to do with a discrete GPU. See how much work Dolphin has to do with the various direct write memory tricks for the GameCube. Now imagine that kind of trickery on a bigger scale for the PS4.
- alias_neo 3y agoI still have a collection of cherry-picked PS3 games I kept so that I could play them one day, upscaled and potentially at better performance than the PS3 was capable of. Despite having hardware that could now play those better than a PS3 using this emulator, I can't get the games from the discs; When my OG 60GB PS3 died I disposed of it and got a slim, which also died, so I bought a new slim, which as far as I can tell now can't/hasn't been hacked, so there's no way to dump my disks. I wasn't too lucky with PS3s to have had so many; I _still_ have my original childhood PS1, sold both my PS2s (OG and Satin Silver) to fund other purchases as a kid, gave away my PS4 to my nephew (who tore it down and couldn't reassemble it) when I got PS5. Same generation as PS3, my 360 also died.
- VyseofArcadia 3y agoWhy not buy a compatiple blu ray drive and dump them on your PC?
- aseipp 3y agoI've been using this to play a silly japanese arcade game, Gundam Extreme Vs. Full Boost -- with my friends, online, over an emulated PSN. Worked immediately on all our PCs. Some random guy even joined our lobby one time. Tested it and Tekken Tag Tournament 2 also worked online. Walked away unbelievably impressed, tbqh.
- apozem 3y agoI recently purchased an old Guitar Hero controller and connected it to RPCS3 emulating Rock Band 3. It worked shockingly well. It felt like playing on a real PS3. This is a super impressive achievement from the RPCS3 team, because rhythm games are horrible with even a little latency.
- callalex 3y agoYou may be interested in Clone Hero.
- apozem 3y agoI have tried Clone Hero and frankly it drove me to RB3. It’s fine if you just want to shred, but my god that UI is hideous. Zero polish. It absolutely feels like an amateur fan project next to RB3.
- LocalH 3y agoHave you tried Rock Band 3 Deluxe? https://github.com/hmxmilohax/rock-band-3-deluxe https://github.com/hmxmilohax/rock-band-3-deluxe
- Nouser76 3y agoI recently installed Clone Hero, with my only PC Guitar Hero-like experience being Frets on Fire probably 15 years ago, and I was blown away by how it felt exactly like Guitar Hero. FoF felt so clunky whereas Clone Hero is a delight. It handled high FPS well, the song interface looked exactly like Guitar Hero, and the customizability is the icing on top. The community has ported over basically every song from every Rock Band or Guitar Hero game, so there's more than enough content. Clone Hero was so smooth I bought a wireless receiver to use my old Rock Band drums and play with my wife. It's a blast!
- pmarreck 3y agoEventually, people will learn that dulling enthusiasm for a thing by limiting it to only people who can afford it is actually more hurtful to your success in the long run. There's literally millions of kids who can't afford your concert ticket/game/movie/whatever but who would become lifelong fans if they could experience the thing NOW.
- dagmx 3y agoIt’s not like what you said hasn’t been tried by various companies. The most successful product ecosystems however have been the ones that can say: - hey devs, we have hardware that is known that you can optimize for and don’t need to troubleshoot against untold permutations of random hardware - hey gamers we give you a consistent experience on here without having to think about settings and debugging drivers - hey investors, when people buy into our ecosystem for even one game, they’re more likely to buy even more games within that platform That’s a lot of wins that overshadow the potential of wider sales. often wide isn’t as lucrative as focused.
- basro 3y agoSo, how do you suggest a company would make profit while also not limiting to people who can afford paying for the product? If you are thinking of the free to play model with microtransactions, I do not think that it would work as well for single player games.
- pmarreck 3y agoI don’t know. What I do know is that illegal consumption of games leads to increased legal consumption though https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy-doesnt-hurt-game-sales-may-actually-help/amp/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy...
- NayamAmarshe 3y agoThis is honestly one of the best emulators ever made! Uncharted 3 was amazing, thank you RPCS3!
- dang 3y agoRelated. Others? Playstation 3 Emulator Adds AMD FSR Upscaling - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28114817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28114817 - Aug 2021 (1 comment) RPCS3 Inside Look: A Deep-Dive into Hardware and Performance Scaling - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24247586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24247586 - Aug 2020 (11 comments) RPCS3 PS3 Emulator – January 2019 Progress Report - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19415445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19415445 - March 2019 (61 comments) RPCS3: An open-source PlayStation 3 emulator for Windows written in C++ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7457764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7457764 - March 2014 (48 comments) (note: links to past threads like the above are just to satisfy extra-curious readers)
- gbraad 3y agoWould be cool if this runs as UWP on an Xbox :-D the irony of compatibility and homebrew development.
- 0x00000000 3y agoI wonder if the PS5 could emulate the PS3 with reasonable performance. It’s sad that Sony seems to have just abandoned 90% of their library rather than putting forth the investment to develop and maintain their emulators like Microsoft has.
- throwawaymobule 3y agoIf it goes anything like how ps2 emulation went on the ps3, Sony will hire someone who worked on emulation for the console and let publishers re-release individual games that are tested to work. I assume they're not doing that because it'd eat into their game-streaming service that has a lot of ps3 games on it. I don't think they will go the same route that Microsoft did, sadly.
- pipeline_peak 3y ago> Motorstorm at 60 fps I just remembered how undesirable the ps3 was when it came out. Then as blu ray depreciated as a consumer media format the console slowly became a less popular Xbox 360