binary solo said:
Now if Sony had really wanted to dominate consoles it would have kept Other OS for the slim and secretly gone to the hacker community and cunningly offered incentives to develop an emulator. The Linux communty already has a Windows emulator for PCs running Linux that may occasionally need to run proprietary Windows SW (like games for Windows). How much of a stretch would it have been to go from Window's emulator to 360 emulator? People keep saying it's really easy to port between PC and 360. I'd buy Alan Wake and the 2 Mass Effects at least if there ever was a 360 emulator on PS3. For me there'd be no point in trying to get a Wii emulator to include motion controls. The Wii games I'm interested in I'm pretty sure can all be played with classic controller. It's a sweet idea but there aren't enough phats still running other OS to make it worth trying to do. Though if some creative hacker was really in to gaming they might try to do it just to see if it can be done. It would put the willies up the gaming industry if a current gen console was able to emulate other current gen consoles. It's one thing to emulate a competitor's console from 2 generations ago it's a whole other thing to do it within the same generation. @ Mike_intellivision: Why would it get shut down by court order? What legal breach would occur? Is there some user agreement that says you'll only play Wii games on a Wii, or 360 games on a 360? An emulator isn't a breach of copyright over the original OS, it's an entirely different piece of software. What's the legal basis for sutting down a user created emulator? |
the problem with that is the different CPU architecture, it is easy to virtualize a PC OS in another PC OS because the hardware is the same. WINE is not an emulator it is an abstraction layer it just emulates software not the hardware. The X360 uses a 3 core IBM RISC chip were as PC's use 86X based CISC CPUs the easy of porting from PC to x360 is more to do with the dev tools that microsoft provide as they are very much the same as PC tools (DirectX, debugers etc). The PS3 uses a Cell processor that has 1 RISC core of the same type as the 360 cores and 7 "synergistic processing elements" that are not full CPU cores they are closer to co-processors (or GPU stream processors) while the Cell does have a lot more compute power but that is more to do with parallelization than raw speed which is important in emulation.
as a rule to emulate a CPU properly you need a CPU ~10x faster than the one you are emulating, it is different when emulating a modern GPU. that is why a Wii emulator wouldn't work as the Wii CPU is reportedly clocked at 729 Mhz while the Cell is clocked at reportedly clocked at 3.2Ghz only ~4x faster the Cells parallel power doesn't really help. the PS2 has a 299Mhz CPU but has 2 co-processors the Cell would be better suited to emulating.
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