Article: WIP - RPCS3 Open Source PS3 Debugger/Emulator Showcased

[grandy]

You can view the page at http://psx-scene.com/forums/content....ator-Showcased

[xPreatorianx]

A PS3 emulator is a good 5+ years away at the very minimum. PS2 is still extremely hard to emulate at full speed on all but the most high end PC's.

Below is a bit of a copy and paste with slight edits. I can't be bothered typing it all up from scratch again.

Current PC hardware still has trouble fully emulating the PS2 at full speeds, so the PS3 is still a good 10 years off. High end PS2 games such as ZOE2 are still extremely difficult to run even on CoreI7 machines. So the PS3 won't happen in the next 5 years ATLEAST.

The only hardware that may be able to run a PS3 emulator are server machines with multiple CPU's and multiple extremely high end GPU's. Current consumer end PC tech won't have the power for quite some time. PS2 is still hard to fully emulate on all but the highest range of PCs and even than it's still hard to run.

Interesting project though. If the goal of this project is a debugger basically it will definitely be beneficial. But if it is going to turn into a full emulator at some point in the future, .00001% of the population will be able to use it.

I honestly can't believe the developers are even considering full PS3 emulation at this point. They need the hardware to even think about that. When consumer hardware can run PS2 titles at full speed without requiring a beast of a machine, than you can expect a bit of progress for a PS3 emulator. But it will still be quite a while after that. The developers have one hell of a pipe dream.

[krytonic]

A PS3 emulator is a good 5+ years away at the very minimum. PS2 is still extremely hard to emulate at full speed on all but the most high end PC's.

Below is a bit of a copy and paste with slight edits. I can't be bothered typing it all up from scratch again.

Current PC hardware still has trouble fully emulating the PS2 at full speeds, so the PS3 is still a good 10 years off. High end PS2 games such as ZOE2 are still extremely difficult to run even on CoreI7 machines. So the PS3 won't happen in the next 5 years ATLEAST.

The only hardware that may be able to run a PS3 emulator are server machines with multiple CPU's and multiple extremely high end GPU's. Current consumer end PC tech won't have the power for quite some time. PS2 is still hard to fully emulate on all but the highest range of PCs and even than it's still hard to run.

Interesting project though. If the goal of this project is a debugger basically it will definitely be beneficial. But if it is going to turn into a full emulator at some point in the future, .00001% of the population will be able to use it.

I honestly can't believe the developers are even considering full PS3 emulation at this point. They need the hardware to even think about that. When consumer hardware can run PS2 titles at full speed without requiring a beast of a machine, than you can expect a bit of progress for a PS3 emulator. But it will still be quite a while after that. The developers have one hell of a pipe dream.

The article DOES say that they don't expect it to be a full emulator for years if it does become one. Once all the debugging stuff is done for it, what harm does it make to start an emulator anyway? With small tweaks over 5+ years it just means it will be even more stable when hardware is available to handle it.

[themuse]

A PS3 emulator is a good 5+ years away at the very minimum. PS2 is still extremely hard to emulate at full speed on all but the most high end PC's.

Below is a bit of a copy and paste with slight edits. I can't be bothered typing it all up from scratch again.

Current PC hardware still has trouble fully emulating the PS2 at full speeds, so the PS3 is still a good 10 years off. High end PS2 games such as ZOE2 are still extremely difficult to run even on CoreI7 machines. So the PS3 won't happen in the next 5 years ATLEAST.

The only hardware that may be able to run a PS3 emulator are server machines with multiple CPU's and multiple extremely high end GPU's. Current consumer end PC tech won't have the power for quite some time. PS2 is still hard to fully emulate on all but the highest range of PCs and even than it's still hard to run.

Interesting project though. If the goal of this project is a debugger basically it will definitely be beneficial. But if it is going to turn into a full emulator at some point in the future, .00001% of the population will be able to use it.

I honestly can't believe the developers are even considering full PS3 emulation at this point. They need the hardware to even think about that. When consumer hardware can run PS2 titles at full speed without requiring a beast of a machine, than you can expect a bit of progress for a PS3 emulator. But it will still be quite a while after that. The developers have one hell of a pipe dream.

hmm what about a crazy custom gaming rig ,i saw one on youtube that had a 4 socket motherboard with 4 xeons and it was liquid cooled everything , ram, mb,processors,hdd's,video cards, it had 4 top of the line video cards all liquid cooled ,liquid cooled ssd's, ii forget how much and what type of ram and what cars he had for video in it ,but i wonder if something like that would run it at all

and god in 5 years i hope we see some other technology by then ,like graphene chips, or non silicon chips , i read an articel like 10 years ago that said we would have diamond based cpu by now ,i dont know whatever happened to that, of course they like their planned obsolesence and will push silicon as far as it will go and get their money worth out of it 1st though ,but i guess wireds' artile was way off ,i kinda doubt we will even have something besides silicon for the home in 5 years even,since intel just built a huge high teck silicon facility recently.i think they would skip over diamond and go straigt to graphene,i hear they are already using it for some things,like these new qdot displays due out at CES as early as next year,people always overestimate i think ,like this ray kurzweil saying we will have a sentiant computer in 30 years , i highly doubt it

[urisma]

It doesn't matter how good of a rig you have. A supercomputer couldn't make a ps3 emulator run at full speed even if it was full of core i7's because of how emulators work. Emulators are NOT generally paralellizable. It's too difficult to maintain proper synchronization between cores in PCSX2, let alone 7 SPEs, 1 PPE, DMA channels and a graphics card (and whatever else goes on in there). You'd need a reeeeealy fast dual or quad core to run it above 2 FPS.

Anyway, an OOP emulator? Really? The object abstraction layer is just a stupid crutch that honestly does no good and will make it all slower. The only clever thing that's going on in the code is the interpreter tables. How they're implemented is neat (with macros). But insanely slow. Not like that matters, you'd need a dynamic binary translator to make it run at 2 FPS anyway.

The memory code makes me want to cry. For srs. Read and write need to be as optimized as possible since they get called all the damn time. Take read128. Read 16 bytes. Pretty simple right? It should take 2 64 bit reads and return them in a character array or a unsigned 128bit struct. Their implementation does the second part, but at the expense of 31 function calls, 16 shifts, 16 adds and 16 subtracts. Really? I mean, maybe the compiler is smart enough to de-stupify it, but I highly doubt it.
Take read64. It should look like this.

u64 read64(u64 where)
{
    u64 offset = where - baseAddress; // baseAddress is the address where the emulated memory start (where the memory would be on the ps3)
    return (u64*)( baseAddress + offset);
}

Wow. Two lines of code! One subtraction, one addition. Pretty simple. No shenanigans like this new "emulator's" memory management does.

I'd add more but I'm tired. Will maybe rant later elsewhere.

[psxscenefan1]

Almost all development is made on simulators and emulators before the hardware is actually finalized, and a in house emulator designed for performance will almost always out perform a 3rd party one made by reversing. That is why Sony can make a ps2 emulator that runs on moderately performing computer aka ps3 console.

Perhaps these people should create an addon card with chips that are the same or similar to the ps3 when possible to augment the emulation until they can get things fast enough to be completely software.

[yoshi314]

A PS3 emulator is a good 5+ years away at the very minimum. PS2 is still extremely hard to emulate at full speed on all but the most high end PC's.

Below is a bit of a copy and paste with slight edits. I can't be bothered typing it all up from scratch again.

Current PC hardware still has trouble fully emulating the PS2 at full speeds, so the PS3 is still a good 10 years off. High end PS2 games such as ZOE2 are still extremely difficult to run even on CoreI7 machines. So the PS3 won't happen in the next 5 years ATLEAST.

The only hardware that may be able to run a PS3 emulator are server machines with multiple CPU's and multiple extremely high end GPU's. Current consumer end PC tech won't have the power for quite some time. PS2 is still hard to fully emulate on all but the highest range of PCs and even than it's still hard to run.

Interesting project though. If the goal of this project is a debugger basically it will definitely be beneficial. But if it is going to turn into a full emulator at some point in the future, .00001% of the population will be able to use it.

I honestly can't believe the developers are even considering full PS3 emulation at this point. They need the hardware to even think about that. When consumer hardware can run PS2 titles at full speed without requiring a beast of a machine, than you can expect a bit of progress for a PS3 emulator. But it will still be quite a while after that. The developers have one hell of a pipe dream.

actually the biggest bottleneck of ps2 emulation is throwing the data between gpu and cpu, due to pc architecture.

however, since amd started pushing integrated cpu+gpu on one chip, that might quickly change (once they fix their design flaws), it's already starting to look beneficial for fast data interchange between cpu and gpu.

as far as ps3 is concerned - depends. ps3 is more of a classic pc-like model of design. only the cpu has special dedicated multimedia instructions, and i think some of what the SPE's are doing might be pulled off as GPU programs. it's still a matter of right hardware and programming.

[lololala]

buy ps3.............free program emulator = slow too slow for release

[xipi]

emulator and recompilers for devs its not an emulator for noobs to play

[Pesebrero]

actually the biggest bottleneck of ps2 emulation is throwing the data between gpu and cpu, due to pc architecture.

however, since amd started pushing integrated cpu+gpu on one chip, that might quickly change (once they fix their design flaws), it's already starting to look beneficial for fast data interchange between cpu and gpu.

as far as ps3 is concerned - depends. ps3 is more of a classic pc-like model of design. only the cpu has special dedicated multimedia instructions, and i think some of what the SPE's are doing might be pulled off as GPU programs. it's still a matter of right hardware and programming.

12345

You can't compare with PS2 emulation. It's hard for me to explain (english is not my mother language). PS2 is extremely difficult to emulate because of the way the Graphics Synthesizer works, and because of its multiple processors.
PS3 is different, it's more like a standard CPU-GPU configuration. Plus, the Cell is well behind the I7 in terms of processing power (forget the teraflops, that's theoretical). I'm not saying that right now we could run a PS3 emulator. But, for certain, the gap between PS2 and PS3 emulation will be a lot smaller than the one between PSX and PS2. I think the most difficult thing to emulate will be the SPUs.