running Emulators on the PS3

[Anthony1]

This dude on Craigslist was selling a PS3, and in his ad for it, he was talking about how it could run SNES emulators and such. Apparently, he installed a bigger hard drive, and put Linux on it, and said that it could run SNES emulators and stuff like that. What I was wondering, is can a PS3 with Linux do anything with regards to emulators that a modded Xbox 1 can't do?

For example, an Xbox 1 can run emulators for alot of systems, but it has some trouble with various N64 games, and some PS1 games, and things of that nature, and with the power of the PS3, I was wondering if the PS3 could run more emulators and run them more smoothly and stuff like that.


I know there are modded Xbox 360's now, but they can only play copied Xbox 360 games, I was wondering when people could get the Xbox 360 to run emulators and stuff. Basically, I'm looking forward to a day when we have a system that gets exploited like the Xbox 1, and it can run every emulator known to man. Like if it could even run Jaguar and 3DO emulators, and the Saturn emulator and PS2 emulation and stuff like that. That would be pretty cool. A modded Xbox is like a virtual library of video gaming history, but it doesn't quite have enough power to run certain Mame roms and things of that nature, but these modern systems with their multiple cores and whatnot, maybe they could do some pretty cool things when the hackers can actually really tap into them. Or do you think that they will never be fully tapped like the Xbox 1 was?

[norkusa]

Yeah, I'm kinda surprised at how slow the 360 homebrew scene is moving. I guess Microsoft was a lot more careful this time around. Apparently someone is working on version of MAME and ScummVM for it. They showed off a working version of it a while ago but I haven't heard anything about it since:

http://www.xbox-scene.com/xbox1data/sep/EEZFpZuFVFfajVjLfN.php

[Cyan]

You can run a wide array of emulators (including zsnes, MAME, etc) on Linux. This includes Linux on the PS3.

The Xbox is an equivalent of a Pentium 3 733mhz processor. The PS3's "Cell" processor is far more powerful than that, which means it will be able to run emulators a lot faster than a Xbox can. This means a lot less slowdown in certain MAME roms and things like that.

However, there is no access to the PS3's graphics acceleration hardware in Linux on the PS3. This means that certain emulators with 3D graphics, such as a N64 emulator, will suffer, and possibly even perform worse than an Xbox (for which full graphics acceleration is available to homebrew software emulators.)

Of course, you can guarantee that a legion of friendly hackers is well at work on getting full homebrew operating on the PS3, natively from the PS3's OS (i.e. without Linux being involved.) Once that happens, with the graphics acceleration unlocked, the system should become quite attractive for that purpose.

-RS.