does anyone here use their PC and emulators as a complete replacement for consoles?

[MrPickins]

The emulators are actually better than the original game system because they have save states whereas games didn't have savepoints until the Sega Genesis era. Classics like Metroid had these big long passwords that take 20 minutes to enter..

Lots of NES games had save features using a battery in the cartridge.

IIRC, Legend of Zelda was the first.

 

[ShawnD1]

Lots of NES games had save features using a battery in the cartridge.

IIRC, Legend of Zelda was the first.

And half the time it didn't work. My Zelda II had the sketchiest save feature ever. Sometimes it saves, sometimes it doesnt, sometimes it deletes things that are already saved, etc.
Fortunately the SNES and Genesis games didn't seem to have that problem. I think the NES used volatile memory whereas the SNES and Genesis used non-volatile memory.

 

[MrPickins]

And half the time it didn't work. My Zelda II had the sketchiest save feature ever. Sometimes it saves, sometimes it doesnt, sometimes it deletes things that are already saved, etc.
Fortunately the SNES and Genesis games didn't seem to have that problem. I think the NES used volatile memory whereas the SNES and Genesis used non-volatile memory.

You did remember to hold reset when switching the power off, right?

Seriously though, I never had a problem with NES carts losing their saves (and I played a lot of games in the 80's). I still have Zelda and Final Fantasy; both have the saved data intact.

Also, SNES carts used battery powered RAM to save games. I'm pretty sure that the Genesis did also (I know the Sega-CD had ram carts you could save to)

 

[Fox5]

There may never be a non-hardware based PlayStation 3 (or Xbox 360) emulator. Current PCs can barely emulate a PlayStation 2 at full speed (many games work, but many don't), and CPUs aren't doubling in speed every couple of years anymore. Roughly speaking you need a PC 10 times as fast the emulated console to even think about emulating it, and you'll need a PC on the order of 100 times as fast to emulate it anywhere close to perfection. The PS3 and 360 both have PowerPC CPUs in the 3GHz range, and you'll probably have to wait a very long time to see 30 GHz PC.

Not true. We don't have 7Ghz cpus either, and the Wii is emulated very well, and its cpu potentially beats (at least matches) each core of the 360/ps3 on a per mhz basis.
On top of that, ps3 and 360 are very multi-core and threaded aware, both have 6 hardware threads and rely heavily on SIMD extensions for their performance, so a parallel processor should do a pretty good job of emulating them.
I'd say its their complexity (full operating systems, complex driver frameworks, and extensive hardware/software protections) that will make emulation unlikely. The original xbox is barely emulated, and the emulation available for the x86 platform in general is very slow.

As far as professional emus, nintendo produced a nearly perfect n64 emulator for gamecube, and the first good n64 emulator (ultrahle) ran on systems with much lower specs than even the gamecube. Not anywhere near perfect, but it was definitely playable with a large number of the available games.

The 3.2GHz PowerPC cores in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 aren't that much slower than the fastest Intel and AMD CPUs cores available today.

A rumored statement from Capcom a while back (maybe even reported by Anandtech?) placed each core of the 360 around a 2.4ghz p4 iirc. A 2.4ghz p4 would be maybe around the performance of a ~1.5ghz i7. Even if the 360 matches the p4 clock per clock, the i7 is nearly twice the per clock performance of a p4.

 

[MrPickins]

Not true. We don't have 7Ghz cpus either, and the Wii is emulated very well, and its cpu potentially beats (at least matches) each core of the 360/ps3 on a per mhz basis.

I'd wager that one reason the wii is emulated is because it has a single-core processor. Emulating multi-cores is much harder from what I gather due to the need to emulate the timing and synchronization.

 

[zerocool84]

Umm, no. The 3.2GHz PowerPC cores in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 aren't that much slower than the fastest Intel and AMD CPUs cores available today.

Of course they are slow. They are already 5 years old at this point. It's just how technology moves. 5 years is an eternity in computing power.

 

[Jadow]

Not true. We don't have 7Ghz cpus either, and the Wii is emulated very well, and its cpu potentially beats (at least matches) each core of the 360/ps3 on a per mhz basis.
On top of that, ps3 and 360 are very multi-core and threaded aware, both have 6 hardware threads and rely heavily on SIMD extensions for their performance, so a parallel processor should do a pretty good job of emulating them.
I'd say its their complexity (full operating systems, complex driver frameworks, and extensive hardware/software protections) that will make emulation unlikely. The original xbox is barely emulated, and the emulation available for the x86 platform in general is very slow.

As far as professional emus, nintendo produced a nearly perfect n64 emulator for gamecube, and the first good n64 emulator (ultrahle) ran on systems with much lower specs than even the gamecube. Not anywhere near perfect, but it was definitely playable with a large number of the available games.



A rumored statement from Capcom a while back (maybe even reported by Anandtech?) placed each core of the 360 around a 2.4ghz p4 iirc. A 2.4ghz p4 would be maybe around the performance of a ~1.5ghz i7. Even if the 360 matches the p4 clock per clock, the i7 is nearly twice the per clock performance of a p4.

Not really true unless the software is multithreaded and benefits from multiple cores.

 

[simonizor]

Not true. We don't have 7Ghz cpus either, and the Wii is emulated very well, and its cpu potentially beats (at least matches) each core of the 360/ps3 on a per mhz basis.

What are you talking about? The Wii only has a 729MHz processor, which isn't even a 300MHz jump from the processor that the GameCube had.

 

[Fox5]

What are you talking about? The Wii only has a 729MHz processor, which isn't even a 300MHz jump from the processor that the GameCube had.

There was a statement that 30ghz processors were needed to emulate the ~3ghz processors in the ps3 and xbox 360. By that logic, it should take a ~7ghz processor to emulate the wii, but it (and pretty much every recent console) were emulated to some significant extent with far less than 10x the core speed.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Not true. We don't have 7Ghz cpus either, and the Wii is emulated very well, and its cpu potentially beats (at least matches) each core of the 360/ps3 on a per mhz basis.

The i7 is hitting ~70GFLOPS, Cell hits 213GFLOPS. There is no chance the i7 can emulate a chip it can't come close to matching in basic number crunching. You can very easily talk about how code optimized for the i7 can perform operations in a more efficient manner then Cell and hence complete more in less cycles, however that does not apply to emulation where you will *always* need more raw computational power. Then there is the whole 'big endian'/'little endian' issues to work around, there is no way an i7 can come close to emulating Cell.

both have 6 hardware threads and rely heavily on SIMD extensions for their performance

You could easily argue they both rely at least as heavily on threading, and Cell has 7 physical cores btw, not 6. Without a doubt someday we will be able to emulate all of the current consoles, but we are eleven years in and still can't emulate the PS2 perfectly- it's going to take a long time.

 

[Skurge]

You could easily argue they both rely at least as heavily on threading, and Cell has 7 physical cores btw, not 6. Without a doubt someday we will be able to emulate all of the current consoles, but we are eleven years in and still can't emulate the PS2 perfectly- it's going to take a long time.

I Understand that, but aren't 6 of those cored pretty weak?

 

[Sureshot324]

Seems to me like a better approach than emulating all the hardware would be using a system like Wine. Just translate all the system calls to the xbox 360/ps3 API.

I don't know if this would work seeing as how none of the consoles use x86 CPUs, and obviously it wouldn't result in the flawless emulation of all games, but performance wise it would be a lot faster than full emulation. Some games are coded to access the hardware directly and some just use high level APIs. The former wouldn't work but the later I think theoretically could.

 

[Fox5]

Seems to me like a better approach than emulating all the hardware would be using a system like Wine. Just translate all the system calls to the xbox 360/ps3 API.

I don't know if this would work seeing as how none of the consoles use x86 CPUs, and obviously it wouldn't result in the flawless emulation of all games, but performance wise it would be a lot faster than full emulation. Some games are coded to access the hardware directly and some just use high level APIs. The former wouldn't work but the later I think theoretically could.

I think that's how most emulators do work now a days, it's rare to see a to the metal emulation.

 

[BenSkywalker]

I Understand that, but aren't 6 of those cored pretty weak?

It depends on how you look at it. If you were to ask most developers if they would rather have a SPE or i7 core to code to, most would jump for the i7 core. That said, after the devs have taken the time to optimize code for the SPEs, each is capable of ~30GFLOPS- for a single core that is considerably more powerful then an i7 core. So from a hardware perspective you could certainly argue that the i7 has vastly superior cores, but when dealing with emulating the PS3 you have to deal with the code written for it which is going to be extremely difficult to do with any x86 chip in the next couple of years at least.

I don't know if this would work seeing as how none of the consoles use x86 CPUs, and obviously it wouldn't result in the flawless emulation of all games, but performance wise it would be a lot faster than full emulation.

Absolutely, but emulating the direct CPU code is going to be very difficult. As a singular example the SPEs don't use a typical cache setup instead making due with SRAM and you can chose what data to put in to SRAM. x86 CPUs won't emulate these types of calls easily, not saying it is impossible, but the amount of SRAM on Cell is significantly larger then what you can handle directly in registers so how you would go about emulating that functionality is going to be exceptionally difficult.

Some games are coded to access the hardware directly and some just use high level APIs.

Emulating the GPU would be trivial in relative terms, its' the CPU which is so different then x86 that would be so hard. The PS2 was actually more 'x86 friendly' then Cell and we still can't emulate that 100%. It's going to be a long while before we manage to get it done for PCs.

 

[Juddog]

I use my newer PC to run emulators. The PS2 emulator was very slow on my old PC but works great on my new PC. Now I can run games at 1920 x 1080 (1080p HDTV via HDMI), or 1650 x 1050 (my old 20" LCD), and they actually look better on my system (4x AA and 4x sampling) than they did on the PS2. New system is an overclocked i7 running at 4.2 Ghz, memory at 1600 @ 6-7-6-18 timing with a 5870 GPU.

The PCSX2 project has come a long way, the newest build supports DirectX 11 and SSE 4.1. My old PC build choked on a lot of the PS2 games and it wasn't really that slow (3.4 Ghz wolfdale, 4 GB RAM, 8800 GT G92 core video card SLI'd), my new PC still has a slight slowdown in spots but generally runs steady at ~60 fps (without the speed limiter it will hit typically between 90 and 180 fps). Also I can enable anti-aliasing and some other nifty features. While it isn't perfect it looks a hell of a lot better than the PS2 ever did.

It actually resparked my interest in PS2 games, and I started finally playing FFXII on it. As mentioned above, if it took this much horsepower to run a PS2 game smoothly, it will take a ridiculous amount of horsepower to get PS3 games running smooth, and you're probably looking at emulators 5 -10 years down the line before it's playable. Given how long ago the PS2 system came out and they're still not optimal, it's a long way off.

I am psyched that I finally go the PS2 emulator running this weekend though, it's really cheap to buy used PS2 games right now since the PS3 has been out for a while, and it's allowed me to play some games that I had on the shelf for a long time.

 

[skace]

I don't believe emulating the PS3 is a hardware issue. I believe it's a complexity issue. We are talking about a system that's biggest problem at launch was that the software developers couldn't figure out how to write games on it. Now we are talking about reverse engineering it to write an emulator that knows what to do with all the data sent over all of the cores. Clearly the cell cores are powerful, however when emulating to a PC you'd want to offload a lot of that work to our much, much more powerful GPUs.

The Xbox360 is another story, I honestly think it's more of a wasted effort than anything else. Xbox360 games get ported over to the PC very easily, and we've already had many of the best entries over there come to the PC. What is it worth to emulate the rest of the system when at any moment Microsoft could probably wholesale port any number of games over to PC. They've stated it previously, they've started to bring the live experience to windows. So what developer is going to risk a ton of time creating an emulator that could end up being completely unnecessary?

 

[magomago]

so this may aid me. I have a ps2 at home (among other consoles lol), and I have a ps2 in the living room here. The ps2 at home is hooked up to an sdtv, but i rarely go home. The ps2 here is hooked up to an hdtv, and playing ps2 games generally looks like SHIT (even the wii isn't that hot...). But i'm in my room a lot, and this sounds like a perfect thing for me. I tried out ff12 yesterday; make the iso (Shoot me if anyone wants to get angry. I have 2 copies -and one is a sealed collectors edition) yesterday and loaded it up in PCSX2; I was getting about 45 fps which is good enough for me. So I want to play it since I'm about 6 hours into the game and never really had a chance to play it. However, I don't want to restart. Even though I'm like 6 hours in, I'm probably only about 1-2 hours in story-wise because I get addicted to doing side quests. So I want to now get my saved story off my memory card to my pc. Does something liek this work? http://cgi.ebay.com/USB-2-0-PS2-Mem...t=Video_Games_Accessories&hash=item41529a397b Or does that only work with a ps3? Can anyone tell me the best way to get my save off the ps2 memory card and read by pcsx2?

 

[Juddog]

so this may aid me. I have a ps2 at home (among other consoles lol), and I have a ps2 in the living room here. The ps2 at home is hooked up to an sdtv, but i rarely go home. The ps2 here is hooked up to an hdtv, and playing ps2 games generally looks like SHIT (even the wii isn't that hot...). But i'm in my room a lot, and this sounds like a perfect thing for me. I tried out ff12 yesterday; make the iso (Shoot me if anyone wants to get angry. I have 2 copies -and one is a sealed collectors edition) yesterday and loaded it up in PCSX2; I was getting about 45 fps which is good enough for me. So I want to play it since I'm about 6 hours into the game and never really had a chance to play it. However, I don't want to restart. Even though I'm like 6 hours in, I'm probably only about 1-2 hours in story-wise because I get addicted to doing side quests. So I want to now get my saved story off my memory card to my pc. Does something liek this work? http://cgi.ebay.com/USB-2-0-PS2-Mem...t=Video_Games_Accessories&hash=item41529a397b Or does that only work with a ps3? Can anyone tell me the best way to get my save off the ps2 memory card and read by pcsx2?

Just replay it from scratch, and remember to not loot the 4 chests this time. Heck if I had a chance I would probably restart so that I knew not to loot the 4 chests to get the zodiac spear. Plus if you're that interested you can always edit your save game file, on the PC it's super easy.

 

[coreyb]

ps2 emulation is pretty good now, been playing lots of old rpgs on it. i dont imagine ps3 emulation will be here and run well for another 8 years or so.

 

[richierich1212]

thanks for bringing up the ps2 emulation. I'll look into that.

 

[magomago]

ps2 emulation is pretty good now, been playing lots of old rpgs on it. i dont imagine ps3 emulation will be here and run well for another 8 years or so.

after playing ff12 for about an hour i'd say its good if you have a 4Ghz i5/i7. Otherwise you won't get perfectly smooth gameplay on every game (ie: ff12). And yes yes I know it depends on the game, as I heard FFX was a lot less intensive, but my x2 6000+ with 4 gigs of ram is having a hell of a time pushing ff12. Yeah it works, but watching drops to 45 fps whenever i face anything that isn't a background does break the experience.

 

[pepperbegs]

Hi,

Would a Q6600 be enough to try emulation? Do dual processors work better then quads?

 

[aigomorla]

ahhhh a system that will finally shutup the console vs pc war.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/07/origin-pcs-big-o-desktop-half-gaming-pc-half-xbox-360-all-mu/

 

[Bryf50]

Hi,

Would a Q6600 be enough to try emulation? Do dual processors work better then quads?

For sure. My Q6600 has no problem with any of the ps2 games I tried to play. Most of the time I was even able to render them at a High Resolution. The main thing to remember with pcsx2 is that each game will prefer different settings. Recently I started playing Xenosaga, it took a lot of trial and error but eventually I got the game to play near flawless at a fairly high resolution.

 

[Juddog]

For those wondering, I do believe that the latest builds of PCSX2 do seem to be better on quad core processors than on dual cores. When I play on my i7, I noticed it doesn't hit the HT threads at all but it does spread the CPU activity across all 4 cores. This is with the SSE 4.1 build, so your mileage may vary.