Gotta make sure Windows doesn't get all the gaming glory, eh? Eh?! Eh?!?!?!
> What is RPCS3?
> RPCS3 is an open-source Sony PlayStation 3 emulator for Windows written in C++. It currently runs only small homebrew applications. The source code for RPCS3 is hosted at: https://github.com/DHrpcs3/rpcs3/
As long as this platform is powerful enough to emulate the PlayStation 3, yes, there is a high chance that RPCS3 will be ported there. However, at the moment we only target Windows and Linux.
Boo-ya-ka-sha? FAQ is probably just outdated. Never seen that on an open source project ;-) luckily I read the whole thing <3
It's definitely a start, though!
It seems we wouldn't even need emulation, "just" an API emulation layer like Wine. And I think the ps3 used openGL, so it might not be too difficult to map that to native calls. And unlike emulators we'd get near-native speeds.
Actually that sounds a bit too simple to be true, what am I missing?
Neither system's encryption has been cracked yet.
Both systems have "hUMA", where the GPU and CPU have a coherent view of memory (at least on the "Onion" bus) and the former can even page fault. This likely makes them rather difficult to emulate properly on computers that don't have similar AMD cards, and I think AMD hasn't even properly exposed APIs for this for those cards on PC.
And, of course, writing something like Wine is a huge amount of work.
But it's definitely possible.
For drivers, proper support for hUMA isn't available yet on PC. There's some pretty recent information on AnandTech: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7825/amd-updates-driver-roadma...
What do they use instead? A custom API?
The cell processors architecture pretty much rules out high fidelity emulation directly on an x86 chip any time soon.
Not all hacks have to be useful (even for a given value of useful).
EDIT: DCKing corrected me on this I erroneously assumed that the CPU architecture was the main hurdle. Turns out the GPU is a much bigger problem. The more you know, thanks DCKing.
That's not to say the exotic Cell architecture is not a major problem for PS3 emulation. It is. But having an x86 CPU does not seem to increase the emulatability of a console at all.
The SPU's are a fundamentally different architecture to an x86 been something akin to a graphics card, heavily optimised for a very particular kind of floating point calculations (somewhat similar to SSE but much more task focused).
A more likely approach is to use something like CUDA/OpenCL but again while closer in architecture the SPU's are incredibly optimised for one thing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4_system_software
[1] http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=48088464&postcoun...
LLE/MME can work, but it's significantly more effort to pull it off; that's the approach I was taking, when I was still working in it.
How is that relevant? Is there any code compiled for the Xbox that actually relies on how the P3 handles microops and pipelines things and all that? Cause if your argument is "X=A+B+C+D" might have several different ways of happening, the answer is that it doesn't matter. So I'm not sure why the author bring this up.
The Wii chip is also OOO but Dolphin seems to do a fantastic job.
That said, timing matters in these tight inner loops, and that is where the details of the CPU pipeline matter, with respect to emulators. How many nanoseconds would it have taken for the emulated CPU to execute those instructions? That requires knowledge of how the CPU works. And sometimes, unfortunately, game code stupidly depends on these details.
On the Xbox, is that really the case?