It is hard. PS3 has incredibly specialized hardware. Even game developers had trouble making games for it at the time because it’s so arcane.
Nah, that’s still a bunch of bull, they designed it and have all the documentation. They know all of its functionality, hidden or otherwise, it’s “undocumented” functions, it’s quirk’s, the very ins and outs of it. They probably still have original designers on staff. They have far more knowledge and experience of their own design than any game developers.
And yet RPCS3, an open source PS3 emulator based on reverse engineered research is able to achieve decent playability on most games.
Not to mention, they’re a multi-billion dollar company, don’t make excuses for them.
AFAIK, the documentation isn’t the main problem. I’m pretty sure PS3 is quite well understood.
The problem is how to translate the code to a typical X86 architecture. PS3’s uses a very different architecture with a big focus on their own special way on doing parallelism. It’s not an easy translation, and it must be done at great speed.
The work on RPCS3 incredible, but it took them more than a decade of optimizations to get where they are now. Wii U emulation got figured out relatively quickly in comparison, even if it uses similar specs to PS3.
Having worked (as a designer, not an engineer) on a PS3 launch tile, this post also aligns with my understanding.
The Wii U was just a souped up Wii so of course the emulation scene had a Wii U emulator in no time.
Just rewrite it in haskell (or Fold)! Problem solved :)
They probably have a bunch of developers like me: Dafuq did I do yesterday? 😵💫
Recent crowdstrike problem be like
There can be a lot of subtle changes going from one uarch to another.
Eg, C/C++ for x64 and ARM both use a coprocessor register to store the pointer to thread-local storage. On x64, you can offset that address and read it from memory as an atomic operation. On ARM, you need to first load it into a core register, then you can read the address with offset from memory. This makes accessing thread-local memory on ARM more complicated to do in a thread safe manner than on x64 because you need to be sure you don’t get pre-empted between those two instructions or one thread can end up with another’s thread-local memory pointer. Some details might be off, it’s been a while since I dealt with this issue. I think there was another thing that had to line up perfectly for the bug to happen (like have it happen during a user-mode context switch).
And that’s an example for two more similar uarchs. I’m not familiar with cell but I understand it to be a lot more different than x64 vs ARM. Sure, they’ve got all the documentation and probably still even have the collective expertise such that everything is known by at least someone without needing to look it up, but those individuals might not have that same understanding on the x64 side of things to see the pitfalls before running into them.
And even once they experience various bugs, they still need to be debugged to figure out what’s going on, and there’s potential that the solution isn’t even possible in the paradigm used to design whatever go-between system they were currently working on.
They are both Turing complete, so there is a 1:1 functional equivalence between them (ie, anything one can do, the other can). But it doesn’t mean both will be able to do it as fast as the other. An obvious example of this is desktops with 2024 hardware and desktops with 1990 hardware also have that 1:1 functional equivalence, but the more recent machines run circles around the older ones.
That’s all understandable, for a startup or young company. But this is Sony a multi-billion dollar electronics company with many MANY released devices and software projects under its belt.
If they had taken things seriously, invested the proper funding and pulled the appropriate personnel they would have no problems getting something out that can beat RPCS3 in a year tops.
They tried to just slap something together as (what someone around here commented a while back) a minimum value add product and shove it out the door. Any claims of “It’s just too hard” they try to make is nothing but cover AFAIC now that people are starting to call them out on it
“It’s too hard” really means “we don’t think the benefit we’d gain is worth the resources and effort it would take to get there”.
Not to mention, they’re a multi-billion dollar company, don’t make excuses for them.
They pay someone handsomely to make excuses for them.
I don’t think it being hard is really the issue. Sony is a billion dollar multi-national corporation and they don’t get any benefit of the doubt whatsoever. Is it hard? Maybe it is, but maybe they should have thought of what they were going to do in the future when they were designing this. As was pointed out elsewhere, volunteers making an open source emulator are managing it so Sony not wanting to, or being unable to, isn’t an excuse.
I always wondered about the legacy of the Cell architecture, which seems to have gone nowhere. I’ve never seen a developer praise it, and you can find devs who love just about every silly weird computer thing. Like, surely someone out there (emu devs?) have respect for what Cell was doing, right?
I’ve never understood it. Multicore processors already existed (the X360 had a triple-core processor, oddly) so I’m not clear what going back to multiple CPUs accomplished. Cell cores could act as FPUs also, right? PS3 didn’t have dedicated GPU, right?
Such a strange little system, I’m still amazed it ever existed. Especially the OG ones that had PS2 chips in them for backwards compatability! Ah, I miss my old PS3.
I think the application of it was wrong.
You basically had game devs that wanted to build cross platform easily. PC, Xbox, and Nintendo used standard architecture while ps3 was unique.
That basically meant you had to develop for ps3 as an entirely separate game than the other major systems.
Xbox One plays a number of 360 games fine.
Apple used QuickTransit for their PPC apps on Intel migration to great success.
I guess Sony just didn’t want to pay the emulator tax?
The xbox one/series consoles run a good number of 360 games dispite the fact that the 360 uses powerPC and the newer consoles are x86.
Sony is out here getting shown up by rpcs3 having about 70℅ of their listed games working perfectly fine by hobbyists reverse engineering the ps3.
Xbox 360 emulated xbox original games too, while Xbox 360 powerpc and Xbox original was x86
There’s some weird online connection issues on 360 that occur with certain modern routers. You get dropped randomly from the game. Annoyingly, the emulated 360 on One doesn’t skirt around the issue. It was annoying for Borderlands but made Left 4 Dead worthless on anything besides easy
The whole point of bringing out a new generation of hardware is to make it work in much better ways of operation than the last one. By default it is not going to run the older generation of games because it doesn’t work in the same way. Now they could spend a lot of effort in making it able to play the old games and work in the old way, but what is their incentive to do that, compared say in starting work on the next generation or releasing the console earlier?
Honest question, can’t they just ask a chip foundry to make a new batch of the components, with even better miniaturization today? The original used 90nm processes, while the later versions of the console used 45nm, nowadays I think even if they opted for 20-25nm for cost saving, it’d still work fine.
