RPCS3 – Open Source Playstation 3 Emulator

https://rpcs3.net/

by notmysql_ • 3 years ago

312 154 3 years ago

rpcs3.net

mouse_• 3 years ago

good project. Much better than PCSX2.

mnd999• 3 years ago

PCSX2 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.

AdammadA2• 3 years ago

Stenzek 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• 3 years ago

That sounds interesting, and I've enjoyed reading the deep dives into dolphin emulation. Could you share a link to these?

DoItToMe81• 3 years ago

I'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• 3 years ago

For 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.

zirgs5• 3 years ago

The 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• 3 years ago

Everything 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).

Narishma3• 3 years ago

IMO they went AMD because that was the only real option left. PPC was dead by then outside of big IBM servers and ARM was just getting into low-end x86 performance levels. If PPC was still getting improved in the embedded space I think they might have went that way for backwards compatibility reasons.

RockRobotRock• 3 years ago

Developers had to be more creative when the hardware shaped the kind of game you were making. that's what's fascinating to me

xattt• 3 years ago

One of the hooks of the PS3 architecture was that it sported a core count greater than 2 in consumer hardware (albeit as a very simplified core).

Rumours about Intel Larrabee were also flying around at the time, so it seemed like the future was here.

derstander• 3 years ago

For some reason, I am very fascinated by the architecture of PS3.

You’re not alone. I also am enchanted by non-standard architectures: the PS3’s Cell, its predecessor the PS2’s Emotion Engine, the Transmeta Crusoe, etc.

There’s a sibling comment to mine that talks about needless complication and dead-ends. That’s fine, but marching along with essentially optimizations to a basic architecture seems boring to me from a creative point of view (not that the achievements made haven’t been, of course, profoundly technically impressive).

And that’s on top of the fact the designing computer architectures can probably be thought of as a huge multidimensional optimization problem (where optimal can change over time or between customer demographics). I think of the approach of iterating as helping us march up that manifold to a local maxima. I think of these “exotic” architectures as sampling far away from those points to see if maybe we can find a more global maxima.

And that’s not to say that the main platforms aren’t innovating: with big-little, NUMA, etc.

But there’s a soft spot in my heart for those wild, long shot bets.

Al0neStar2• 3 years ago

This 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-x2...

arghwhat• 3 years ago

Lacks 7000 series Ryzen...

askiiart• 3 years ago

Note that Ryzen 7000 is only missing in the tier list tab, not the "what do I buy?" one.

hughesjj2• 3 years ago

Also all threadrippers

dataflow360• 3 years ago

No mentions of Apple Silicon, and a quick Googling didn't reveal much. Anyone have insight or experience?

Asking for an M1 Max 64GB ;)

smcl• 3 years ago

You could just try it out and document your experience somewhere

Shekelphile2• 3 years ago

I 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.

Al0neStar2• 3 years ago

According 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

Forgeties79• 3 years ago

Check out apple’s recently announced game porting tool kit

leetbulb2• 3 years ago

I'm trying this out on an M1 Air and while the emulator itself works great, performance is very lacking.

adhvaryu• 3 years ago

Slightly 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/...

Narishma3• 3 years ago

Doesn't that case only apply in the USA?

leehuffman2• 3 years ago

Who 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.

dontlaugh• 3 years ago

The US is a significant market and emulators being allowed there helps emulators in general?

passwordoops• 3 years ago

As demonstrated by copyright, US legislatures generally define global law when it comes to tech and entertainment

causi• 3 years ago

Yes, but it doesn't need to apply anywhere else for people everywhere to be able to access the software. It only needs one place where it can be openly worked on.

ASalazarMX• 3 years ago

If USA doesn't care about emulation, it means those specific copyright tentacles won't poke my government, hence my country (Mexico) also won't care. Even if USA cares, sometimes my country still won't care if it means spending a lot of money on policying the Internet.

Sometimes, the love-hate relationship between Mexico and USA has its advantages.

patmorgan23• 3 years ago

International copyright law is somewhat harmonized through international treaties. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) actually implements what the US is obligated to when it joined the World Intellectual Property Organization.

LeFantome• 3 years ago

It may be a US law but the result is greater availability of emulated tech. As a regular user, the legality of the emulator is secondary to the likelihood of the emulator existing.

_shantaram• 3 years ago

Seconded. My PC hardware was never very powerful either, but I had access to the entire library of (S)NES/GB(A) games to play on my mum's phone as a child.

jl6• 3 years ago

Am 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• 3 years ago

Yes, in fact the PS4 is beginning to see HLE with various emulators, most notably fpPS4 (free pascal PS4).

https://github.com/red-prig/fpPS4

djxfade• 3 years ago

Perhaps, 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• 3 years ago

I’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…

ericlewis2• 3 years ago

Pentium III no?

_kbh_• 3 years ago

Am 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?

Easier to emulate to a working state, but potentially harder to emulate to good performance if a game uses any of the quirks of a modern console like the high bandwidth shared memory, fast storage, custom hardware, etc.

easyThrowaway• 3 years ago

Sure, but we're still talking about customized SoCs, with some additional silicon in there for extra audio and video DSPs. Also I'd bet that even on modern architectures most console games (or their base libraries) still require precise timing on the side of memory access, CPU stalls, instruction cycles, available bandwidth, etc.

Once you start requiring per-cycle emulation of any of those components we lose any advantages from having any kind of paravirtualization elsewhere.

dottjt• 3 years ago

The 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• 3 years ago

The 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.

kevincox2• 3 years ago

The PS5 is basically a regular old desktop computer. The PS3 has a quite unique multi-"cell" architecture.

fulafel• 3 years ago

The hw is tricky to program (eg SPUs can't directly access main memory), but not necessarily hard to implement.

jerf• 3 years ago

"Keep in mind, the US Air force connected 1000+ of these together for super computing purposes."

Which I have long suspected was just a marketing stunt, because even at the time it made no sense. Even on the day of release, the PS3 was merely right where we'd expect a console of the time to perform. No better, and certainly not massively better.

My hat's off to Sony for the quality of their propaganda around the PS3. Lots of people still seem to believe it was something amazing, rather than... a console, which worked about as well as expected. Honestly I'd rate it a bit under par when evaluated objectively, in their zeal to pump up some of their metrics they trashed some other ones like the way memory access works in that system. They'd probably have been better off with a more traditional architecture in the end.

throwawaymobule3• 3 years ago

The consoles were cheaper than buying the same CPU from IBM. I think that was their logic.

fomine3• 3 years ago

Cell was theoretically great about computing, but moderate (or worse) about gaming

mateuszf3• 3 years ago

I'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• 3 years ago

Having 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.

mateuszf3• 3 years ago

Looking 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?

dagmx16• 3 years ago

The 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_neo2• 3 years ago

I 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• 3 years ago

Why not buy a compatiple blu ray drive and dump them on your PC?

alias_neo2• 3 years ago

I hadn't considered that; It's been a _while_ since I've had a PC with a disc drive; thanks for the suggestion!

aseipp• 3 years ago

I'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.

apozem2• 3 years ago

I 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• 3 years ago

RPCS3 – Open Source Playstation 3 Emulator

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