RPCS3 FAQ

[montcer9012]

I read once that game developers have the consoles manual and proper software in order to make a game on it, and due the complex level of the PS3 it was very difficult even to developers (who own that manual) make a proper game at the begging... So, those who are trying to run RPCS3 without the SONY manual are really heroes hahahaha.

Either way, i was curious about something from SONY... Is that Vita can run bunch of PSP games, so i wonder if Vita has a PSP emulator, or if developers ports those PSP games direct to the Vita? It's interesting if we notice that PSP games on Vita run perfect.

[Runo]

There are several different ways to achieve backwards compatibility in a console system. I'd really like to elaborate on this but I lack the time right now XD
But even if it was an emulator they could easily achieve perfect emulation if they had the original hardware blueprints and projects. The problem here is that we kinda have to guess how it works inside based on the difference between input and output.

[Sincereless]

Over in the xda dev forums we're talking about what kind of specs are needed to have a Next gen console on the latest phones. In particular we're talking about The latest Galaxy S4. A certain model of the S4, The GT I9500 or S4 Exynos runs a dual quad core system. 1 set of 4 cores running at 1.6 and another set running at 1.2 but only one set at any given time. In this discussion it is suggest the max settings would be to bypass and run all 8 cores with one set of four cores being 1.8 and the other being 1.4. Beyond that we all scratching our heads as to what is all required to emulate consoles like the PS3. And what better way to find out than the group that's working on one. So the question is...

What are the absolute minimum and recommended specs to emulate the PS3? And if you happen to know the specs required for the Xbox 360 and Wii we'd would appreciate that as well.

Sincerely,
Sincereless

[Hykem]

Over in the xda dev forums we're talking about what kind of specs are needed to have a Next gen console on the latest phones. In particular we're talking about The latest Galaxy S4. A certain model of the S4, The GT I9500 or S4 Exynos runs a dual quad core system. 1 set of 4 cores running at 1.6 and another set running at 1.2 but only one set at any given time. In this discussion it is suggest the max settings would be to bypass and run all 8 cores with one set of four cores being 1.8 and the other being 1.4. Beyond that we all scratching our heads as to what is all required to emulate consoles like the PS3. And what better way to find out than the group that's working on one. So the question is...

What are the absolute minimum and recommended specs to emulate the PS3? And if you happen to know the specs required for the Xbox 360 and Wii we'd would appreciate that as well.

Sincerely,
Sincereless

Clearly the main issue is the CPU. PS3's Cell is powerful and hard to emulate due to lack of resources.

Cell is a multi-core microprocessor that combines a PPE (Power Processor Element) and up to 8 SPEs (Synergistic Processing Elements). The SPE units are responsible for vectorized floating point instructions, while the PPE is the real core of the PS3's CPU, responsible for managing all the other units.

In the PS3, one of the SPEs is not used, but each unit is clocked at 3.2Ghz. While this may seem a lot, remember that SPE units are more basic and mostly used to aid the main PPE unit, so we can't really say that the PS3's CPU has 8 cores (1 PPE + 7 SPE), but it's somewhat close.

In theory, emulating the 3.2Ghz PPE unit wouldn't be hard in a high-end PC, but emulating 7 more units at the same clock speed is quite an insane task.
Of course that we also have to consider that most applications don't use all of the PS3's power, but for accurate emulation, we would need to be able to emulate the equivalent of an 3.2Ghz 8-core processor.

If we consider, in terms of emulation, that we need about 10x more resources that the ones used by the console, we would need a huge ammount of processing power to accurately emulate the Cell microprocessor.

The same principles can be applied to the Xbox360 and the Wii.
The Xbox360's Xenon processor is equivalent to 3 PS3's PPE units (and no SPE units). It's processor is a custom tri-core PowerPC based CPU.

The Wii's Broadway processor is way less powerful, making it easier to emulate, but it still requires a lot of computing resources.
It's a single core CPU clocked at 729Mhz.

As a small comparison, the PSP's CPU is a single core MIPS R4000 based processor, clocked at 333Mhz.

So, as you can see, it's not easy to tell exactly how much processing power is needed, but not even the most recent PCs are ready to fully emulate the PS3 or the Xbox360.

[Sincereless]

That settles whether the 360 and PS3 could ever be used on the phone. From what the numbers you just explained the Wii would be a very viable next step. The PSP emulation is already handled through this phone's ancestors which lines up with the presumption the S4 can handle the Wii based on what is said.

Reverse engineering the software builds of the systems is out of my scope of talents however in theory is it possible to write codes to cap off any connection it may need for online functionality and dump the entire software program into a proprietary build and recode the non-functioning portions from a trial and error perspective? For example: Take a System formatted PS3(One that has no OS) and dump another PS3 in its entirety in it. In essense, would it run like nothing has changed?

[Hykem]

That settles whether the 360 and PS3 could ever be used on the phone. From what the numbers you just explained the Wii would be a very viable next step. The PSP emulation is already handled through this phone's ancestors which lines up with the presumption the S4 can handle the Wii based on what is said.

Reverse engineering the software builds of the systems is out of my scope of talents however in theory is it possible to write codes to cap off any connection it may need for online functionality and dump the entire software program into a proprietary build and recode the non-functioning portions from a trial and error perspective? For example: Take a System formatted PS3(One that has no OS) and dump another PS3 in its entirety in it. In essense, would it run like nothing has changed?

Yes, the Wii may be the next platform to be emulated on phones.

However, the best approach to it would be HLE (High-level emulation). JPCSP for example is a high-level emulator and so is PPSSPP (which is now able to run on several different architectures thanks to JIT recompilation).

Your suggestion is an emulator based on LLE (Low-level emulation), which would require the original BIOS/Firmware/System files, but it would run like nothing changed. Unfortunately, this would rise up a lot of copyright issues and it would be much more difficult to change functionalities (like online connectivity).
With a high-level emulator, this could be all written from scratch and then ported from PC to any phone that could handle it.

A good ideia would be to work on an Android port of the Dolphin emulator. This is already being done at the official forums: http://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Forum-android
There's already a release for Android, but of course, it still runs slowly and buggy.

[Runo]

Not to mention HLEing can be much much faster if done right, even tough less accurate.

[Ekaseo]

so you r saying that HLE is faster but less accurate but LLE is slower but more accurate?

[Gundark]

With HLE it's impossible to have high accuracy. You'll always have an issues. If it isn't for high hardware demands for LLE devs would never bother with HLE.

[Runo]

so you r saying that HLE is faster but less accurate but LLE is slower but more accurate?

Yeah that's pretty much what I was saying.
It's not a absolute fact tough, it's more of a consequence of how each of the two methods work.

With HLE it's impossible to have high accuracy. You'll always have an issues. If it isn't for high hardware demands for LLE devs would never bother with HLE.

That depends on what you call 'high accuracy'. I like to think Project64 is very accurate nowadays. It's not perfect, but it provides perfect emulation in a lot of games. And even tough LLE leads to a more assurable path to perfect accuracy, that doesn't mean you couldn't achieve perfect emulation with HLE. It's just very hard for modern platforms emulation, unlikely even.

If you ask me, I kinda prefer High Level Emulation for most consoles. It's an improvement to the entire concept of hardware emulation, it's better and more clever than LLE. It's just much harder to implement right.