It is hard. PS3 has incredibly specialized hardware. Even game developers had trouble making games for it at the time because it’s so arcane.
Nah, that’s still a bunch of bull, they designed it and have all the documentation. They know all of its functionality, hidden or otherwise, it’s “undocumented” functions, it’s quirk’s, the very ins and outs of it. They probably still have original designers on staff. They have far more knowledge and experience of their own design than any game developers.
And yet RPCS3, an open source PS3 emulator based on reverse engineered research is able to achieve decent playability on most games.
Not to mention, they’re a multi-billion dollar company, don’t make excuses for them.
AFAIK, the documentation isn’t the main problem. I’m pretty sure PS3 is quite well understood.
The problem is how to translate the code to a typical X86 architecture. PS3’s uses a very different architecture with a big focus on their own special way on doing parallelism. It’s not an easy translation, and it must be done at great speed.
The work on RPCS3 incredible, but it took them more than a decade of optimizations to get where they are now. Wii U emulation got figured out relatively quickly in comparison, even if it uses similar specs to PS3.
Xbox One plays a number of 360 games fine.
Apple used QuickTransit for their PPC apps on Intel migration to great success.
I guess Sony just didn’t want to pay the emulator tax?
The xbox one/series consoles run a good number of 360 games dispite the fact that the 360 uses powerPC and the newer consoles are x86.
Sony is out here getting shown up by rpcs3 having about 70℅ of their listed games working perfectly fine by hobbyists reverse engineering the ps3.
It’s because they can believe they rebuilt and recompiled them for x86
Apple did the same again with their ARM migration and in my experience it worked great. I believe Microsoft also has a solution for running x86 software on ARM.
The PS3 is the epitome of “idiots admire complexity […]” it was needlessly complicated with its cell architecture.
There are design decisions that I really don’t understand why Sony made them. They do, however, make the PS3 the ideal piece of hardware if you’re wanting to build an adhoc super computer
I think the world has learned from this, since we’re abstracting and decoupling much more than before, as well as developing new and modernising old tooling all the time to lower that barrier to entry.
Shout outs to the game Devs who had to deal with this shit for 3 years straight, as their keyboards were probably salty from all the crying, their rubber ducky all crumpled and deflated.
Emulating a processor with a unique set of properties, including infinite scalability, is hard. You can’t just put an emulation layer on top of x86 like you can with a processor that’s a subset of x86 instructions
you can to some extent, its not like you couldnt throw an emulator designed for one architecture to one with a subset, as its already shown on the PS4 for example that you could throw dolphin and cemu on a ps4 running linux. (not that it would run nice, but its possible).
its only harder if youre trying to do it in the base OS necause the base OS is usually lacking a graphics API rather than it be a hardware issue itself that presents problems. Its why jokingly people are saying the Xbox Series may be able to run PS3 soon beccause dev mode was updated with Mesa, which includes support from both opengl and vulkan. And alien hardware isnt usually always the issue, given random devices are capable of pf running Sega Saturn, which on its own lile the PS3, had extremely unique hardware
I saved up and bought a reasonably beefy Mini PC, and turned it into an emulation console with Batocera. PS3 emulation runs like an absolute dream. But who needs backwards compatibility, when we can resell you the same game from 15 years ago, again, at full price???
Same, Ryzen 5700U. Handles it just fine.
My 60 gb RIP after an ex left it on all night with sonic collections paused.
Imagine if Sony executives got their way and the PS3 had two cell processors and no conventional GPU. It would have been even more of a nightmare to work on.
Would that have even worked? I can’t imagine you’d be able to get anything better than PS2 graphics with just an extra CPU.
The SPEs on the cell processor are actually pretty good at rendering graphics. In a lot of late gen exclusive PS3 games you can see that the developers utilised them more and more for graphics rendering. So the plan was to have the SPEs on both cell processors do all the graphics.
I remember how some PS3 models have like the entire PS2 hardware inside them and it could run both ps1 and ps2 games.
