It's unbelievable that over the whole course of PS3's lifespan we've gone from "we will never be able to emulate this at full speed, the hardware is too slow and the Cell architecture too alien" to "why is PS3 emulation so fast, optimizations explained". I've been loosely tracking various emulators' progress and it's hats off with regards to the ingenuity behind all of the mechanisms that make it possible to emulate things fast enough.
deaddodo 2 hours ago [-]
I don't think anyone with knowledge of emulation (from a research and development side) would say it's impossible. The Cell is a standard PPC core with some well-documented[1] coprocessors.
A more realistic response would be: "computing hardware would not be powerful enough to emulate the PS3 in it's lifetime". We're now two decades out from it's release, and a decade out from it's final phase-out, so it seems that was a fair assessment.
Sony learned their lesson from what happened with the PS1, where commercial emulators like Bleem became available during the product's lifetime. It was probably not a huge deal in terms of lost sales, but Sony really didn't like this, as evident by their lawsuit (which also failed).
The PS2 with its Emotion engine was a huge leap which was pretty hard to emulate for a while. And the PS3 was even harder. Yes the developers hated the Cell architecture, but overall, Sony managed to create a pretty good system which spawned incredible games, while also being so hard to emulate that it took over a decade to reach a point where it's done properly, and almost 20 years to reach a point where it's considered really fast.
Compare this to the Switch, which was being emulated pretty well from the get go. This allowed some people to just make do with an emulator instead of buying the console (and the games). Actually this goes for pretty much all Nintendo devices.
glimshe 23 minutes ago [-]
Sony didn't create the cell architecture to prevent efficient emulation. At the time, manufacturers tried to get as much performance as possible from the manufacturing dollar under the assumption that developers would optimize their games for the machine. It was actually a partial failure, as few third party titles made full use of the architecture.
FirmwareBurner 3 hours ago [-]
To be fair PC CPUs and GPUs have evolved leaps and bounds form the beginning of PS3 emulation till today.
leshokunin 4 hours ago [-]
What’s particularly interesting here is that Sony and IBM spent a billion dollars to make the Cell. It was designed to be completely different from previous console CPUs. Even more so than the PS2’s “emotion engine” combo. So the fact that it’s so well emulated and also performant is remarkable!
deaddodo 2 hours ago [-]
> It was designed to be completely different from previous console CPUs.
Sure, but they used a PowerPC core with specialized SIMD processors that they then extensively documented:
If they hadn't done the latter, it would probably have taken a lot longer to reverse engineer. It also would have made it near impossible for developers to code effectively for it, however.
seam_carver 6 hours ago [-]
Happy that RPCS3 has added native apple silicon support
Rendered at 09:56:25 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
A more realistic response would be: "computing hardware would not be powerful enough to emulate the PS3 in it's lifetime". We're now two decades out from it's release, and a decade out from it's final phase-out, so it seems that was a fair assessment.
1 - https://arcb.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/SDK3.0/docs/a...
The PS2 with its Emotion engine was a huge leap which was pretty hard to emulate for a while. And the PS3 was even harder. Yes the developers hated the Cell architecture, but overall, Sony managed to create a pretty good system which spawned incredible games, while also being so hard to emulate that it took over a decade to reach a point where it's done properly, and almost 20 years to reach a point where it's considered really fast.
Compare this to the Switch, which was being emulated pretty well from the get go. This allowed some people to just make do with an emulator instead of buying the console (and the games). Actually this goes for pretty much all Nintendo devices.
Sure, but they used a PowerPC core with specialized SIMD processors that they then extensively documented:
https://arcb.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/SDK3.0/docs/a...
If they hadn't done the latter, it would probably have taken a lot longer to reverse engineer. It also would have made it near impossible for developers to code effectively for it, however.