nickblame: Tell us a little bit about the rpcs3 team.
AlexAltea: I don't see a clearly defined group of people called the "RPCS3 team", even if we use that term sometimes. We all know each other and what we are working on, but we cannot make a list of people in and outside the team, since that division is not clear. Anyone is welcome to enter, give his opinion, and will of course be credited for his collaboration.
Hykem: There isn't really a defined team. RPCS3 is open-source and hosted at github, so anyone who wishes to contribute and add code to the project is automatically a member of RPCS3's "team".
nickblame: I consider you guys part of the emunewz team. So I’d like to ask, do you like emunewz.net? The site and the people in it?
Hykem: I do. The emunewz.net portal has been crucial for gathering user reports for JPCSP and RPCS3 which helped developers working on these emulators.
The users at emunewz.net are generally kind and helpful and that gives me a very good reason to keep working.
nickblame Which was the first project of yours in terms of writing an emulator?
Hykem: The first emulation project I was ever involved in was JPCSP.
AlexAltea: This (RPCS3) is the first emulator I'm involved. However, I think my background knowledge is enough for working here and be able to learn throughout the process.
nickblame When did you start working on Rpcs3? And what is the routine of a rpcs3 dev team member?
Hykem: From the very beginning. DH contacted me a long time ago asking if I was interested in taking part of his new project for a PS3 emulator, so we founded RPCS3. From that point on I helped him reverse engineer core parts of the PS3 and months later I began writing code for RPCS3 as well.
Routine of a RPCS3 dev? Discuss in chat/IRC, write code, test, commit.
AlexAltea: After all the hard work DH and Hykem did during the first 2 years of the emulator and the valuable support of BlackDaemon, I joined the team in September 2013. And started doing some simple things in the emulator, until I understood most of its pieces. In the next weeks/months more people like NekotekinaHito and Oil read about the project and decided to join it, doing a really awesome work.
nickblame: First commercial games showing stuff was news that made some headlines. Was it such a big excitement for the dev team too?
AlexAltea: Indeed, that was a real surprise for us as well. It's true that Arkedo made a simple game engine for their Swap! game, but we were still very happy about that.
Hykem: It was indeed a big surprise. We didn't have any plans to get a specific game running (often a common approach to extend compatibility), so it truly came out of nowhere (well, from BlackDaemon's game collection
).
Even though it's a simple game (comparable to homebrew applications, in fact), it places a nice milestone in RPCS3's history.
nickblame Do you enjoy working on Rpcs3? What are your goals and plans for Rpcs3?
AlexAltea: Of course! I guess the main reason for working on RPCS3 is because it's a fun and instructive goal. We are aware of some missing features on RPCS3 and we will implement them as soon as possible. Since our main goal is to improve the compatibility rather than the performance, most of the future plans are deduced with the trial-and-error paradigm, that is, testing games and fixing errors. Some of this future goals are listed in: https://github.com/DHrpcs3/rpcs3/wiki/Roadmap. An attempt to speed-up this has been done with: https://github.com/DHrpcs3/ps3autotests/
Hykem: I obviously do. All the contributors are great people always willing to work and push the emulator even further which is truly a big motivation.
I see RPCS3 as a very interesting challenge and a great proof of concept.
My plans for the emulator are vast, but I'm currently working on the cryptography engine for RPCS3 with the purpose of implementing on-the-fly data decryption which is commonly used by applications.
There are also many other goals in RPCS3's roadmap (https://github.com/DHrpcs3/rpcs3/wiki/Roadmap ) in which I intend to work on.
nickblame Would you say that the PS3 emulation resembles PSP emulation? Is it similar? I mean, we all know that the PS2 is hard to emulate and everyone would think the same for PS3 and the CELL processor. But if the platform layout looks more like PSP then we could hope for fast results (relatively).. right?
AlexAltea: Yes, RPCS3 is being developed as a HLE emulator (similar to JPCSP or PPSSPP) where the system calls replaced them with our custom native (non-emulated, and therefore much faster) implementations. However in comparison with the PSP, the amount of APIs and modules the PS3 offers is huge. Starting for minor complications like different screen resolutions, different number of gamepads, keyboards, mouses, lots of image/video/audio codecs, TTF fonts, string conversions, and high level graphical APIs to huge scary monsters like the Cell CPU or the RSX GPU, there is a lot to do in RPCS3. Fast results are not to be expected in a small team like we are now, but we are of course open to submissions from other developers.
Hykem: It does resemble PSP emulation from a high level standpoint. Both systems have their own customized operating systems instead of accessing the hardware directly.
However, that's where the similarities end. The PS3's complexity is huge when compared to the PSP's.
Don't expect any fast results based on this. Emulating the PS3 to an acceptable degree will take a lot of time, even with a considerable amount of collaborators.
nickblame Okay I am just going to go ahead and say it. I don’t care how lame the question is, I’ll just pop it out there. When will we play “The last of us” on rpcs3?
AlexAltea: I cannot give an accurate answer for this, since it depends on lots of variables. How many people will work in RPCS3 in the future? How many free-time will they have? How experienced they are with the PS3 environment, emulators in general, C++, OpenGL? What cool APIs (e.g. Mantle) will appear for PCs and what new extensions (AVX-512, TSX, ...)? I can only guarantee that some day it will be possible, since the only major problem we could face would be related with speed. Instead of waiting idly for such machines, I think it's a good idea to start working in last-gen emulators in the meantime.
Hykem: Yeah... Not anytime soon, sorry.
There's a huge processing power restriction issue that can't be surpassed by software alone.
Even if the emulator is coded well enough to the point it practically mimics a real PS3, it still won't be able to run any major commercial games.
We all know about this and we all knew it before. However, this is quite likely to change in the future and by then, we will already have the basis for a fully functional emulator. Talk about thinking ahead, right?
Find the latest buids of rpcs3 in the corresponding forum, source is hosted at github, official forums over here at emunewz, and a new official site rpcs3.net is coming up right here
AlexAltea: I don't see a clearly defined group of people called the "RPCS3 team", even if we use that term sometimes. We all know each other and what we are working on, but we cannot make a list of people in and outside the team, since that division is not clear. Anyone is welcome to enter, give his opinion, and will of course be credited for his collaboration.
Hykem: There isn't really a defined team. RPCS3 is open-source and hosted at github, so anyone who wishes to contribute and add code to the project is automatically a member of RPCS3's "team".
nickblame: I consider you guys part of the emunewz team. So I’d like to ask, do you like emunewz.net? The site and the people in it?
Hykem: I do. The emunewz.net portal has been crucial for gathering user reports for JPCSP and RPCS3 which helped developers working on these emulators.
The users at emunewz.net are generally kind and helpful and that gives me a very good reason to keep working.
nickblame Which was the first project of yours in terms of writing an emulator?
Hykem: The first emulation project I was ever involved in was JPCSP.
AlexAltea: This (RPCS3) is the first emulator I'm involved. However, I think my background knowledge is enough for working here and be able to learn throughout the process.
nickblame When did you start working on Rpcs3? And what is the routine of a rpcs3 dev team member?
Hykem: From the very beginning. DH contacted me a long time ago asking if I was interested in taking part of his new project for a PS3 emulator, so we founded RPCS3. From that point on I helped him reverse engineer core parts of the PS3 and months later I began writing code for RPCS3 as well.
Routine of a RPCS3 dev? Discuss in chat/IRC, write code, test, commit.
AlexAltea: After all the hard work DH and Hykem did during the first 2 years of the emulator and the valuable support of BlackDaemon, I joined the team in September 2013. And started doing some simple things in the emulator, until I understood most of its pieces. In the next weeks/months more people like NekotekinaHito and Oil read about the project and decided to join it, doing a really awesome work.
nickblame: First commercial games showing stuff was news that made some headlines. Was it such a big excitement for the dev team too?
AlexAltea: Indeed, that was a real surprise for us as well. It's true that Arkedo made a simple game engine for their Swap! game, but we were still very happy about that.
Hykem: It was indeed a big surprise. We didn't have any plans to get a specific game running (often a common approach to extend compatibility), so it truly came out of nowhere (well, from BlackDaemon's game collection
).Even though it's a simple game (comparable to homebrew applications, in fact), it places a nice milestone in RPCS3's history.
nickblame Do you enjoy working on Rpcs3? What are your goals and plans for Rpcs3?
AlexAltea: Of course! I guess the main reason for working on RPCS3 is because it's a fun and instructive goal. We are aware of some missing features on RPCS3 and we will implement them as soon as possible. Since our main goal is to improve the compatibility rather than the performance, most of the future plans are deduced with the trial-and-error paradigm, that is, testing games and fixing errors. Some of this future goals are listed in: https://github.com/DHrpcs3/rpcs3/wiki/Roadmap. An attempt to speed-up this has been done with: https://github.com/DHrpcs3/ps3autotests/
Hykem: I obviously do. All the contributors are great people always willing to work and push the emulator even further which is truly a big motivation.
I see RPCS3 as a very interesting challenge and a great proof of concept.
My plans for the emulator are vast, but I'm currently working on the cryptography engine for RPCS3 with the purpose of implementing on-the-fly data decryption which is commonly used by applications.
There are also many other goals in RPCS3's roadmap (https://github.com/DHrpcs3/rpcs3/wiki/Roadmap ) in which I intend to work on.
nickblame Would you say that the PS3 emulation resembles PSP emulation? Is it similar? I mean, we all know that the PS2 is hard to emulate and everyone would think the same for PS3 and the CELL processor. But if the platform layout looks more like PSP then we could hope for fast results (relatively).. right?
AlexAltea: Yes, RPCS3 is being developed as a HLE emulator (similar to JPCSP or PPSSPP) where the system calls replaced them with our custom native (non-emulated, and therefore much faster) implementations. However in comparison with the PSP, the amount of APIs and modules the PS3 offers is huge. Starting for minor complications like different screen resolutions, different number of gamepads, keyboards, mouses, lots of image/video/audio codecs, TTF fonts, string conversions, and high level graphical APIs to huge scary monsters like the Cell CPU or the RSX GPU, there is a lot to do in RPCS3. Fast results are not to be expected in a small team like we are now, but we are of course open to submissions from other developers.
Hykem: It does resemble PSP emulation from a high level standpoint. Both systems have their own customized operating systems instead of accessing the hardware directly.
However, that's where the similarities end. The PS3's complexity is huge when compared to the PSP's.
Don't expect any fast results based on this. Emulating the PS3 to an acceptable degree will take a lot of time, even with a considerable amount of collaborators.
nickblame Okay I am just going to go ahead and say it. I don’t care how lame the question is, I’ll just pop it out there. When will we play “The last of us” on rpcs3?
AlexAltea: I cannot give an accurate answer for this, since it depends on lots of variables. How many people will work in RPCS3 in the future? How many free-time will they have? How experienced they are with the PS3 environment, emulators in general, C++, OpenGL? What cool APIs (e.g. Mantle) will appear for PCs and what new extensions (AVX-512, TSX, ...)? I can only guarantee that some day it will be possible, since the only major problem we could face would be related with speed. Instead of waiting idly for such machines, I think it's a good idea to start working in last-gen emulators in the meantime.
Hykem: Yeah... Not anytime soon, sorry.
There's a huge processing power restriction issue that can't be surpassed by software alone.
Even if the emulator is coded well enough to the point it practically mimics a real PS3, it still won't be able to run any major commercial games.
We all know about this and we all knew it before. However, this is quite likely to change in the future and by then, we will already have the basis for a fully functional emulator. Talk about thinking ahead, right?
Find the latest buids of rpcs3 in the corresponding forum, source is hosted at github, official forums over here at emunewz, and a new official site rpcs3.net is coming up right here
