Why no PS2, XBox, or Gamecube emulators yet?

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-07-27 11:23am

The PS came out in 1995 (in the US, anyway) and by 1999 Bleem! was working at basically full capacity, and other emulators soon followed. That's a period of only 4 years. It's now been 6 years since the PS2 came out, and no one is even talking about an emulator on the horizon. I'm especially surprised at the lack of an XBox emulator, since it's so similar to PC. What's the deal? Has technology become so complex that amateurs in their garages are no longer capable of making emulators, or was the last round of consoles unusually complicated and hard to emulate (I can believe that about the PS2 quite easily)? And most importantly, when will I be able to play Guitar Hero on my PC? Furthermore, why haven't any of these companies considered that they could make more money selling an emulator for $50 than selling the system itself for $120?

P.S. If someone starts talking about where to find ROMs or some other forbidden topic before I can get answers to my questions, I'll personally rip his lungs out.

SyntaxVorlon · Post by **SyntaxVorlon** » 2006-07-27 11:25am

It might just be that buying a PS2, XBox, and GameCube now, is cheaper than building a computer that has the graphics power to emulate their abilities.

Bounty · Post by **Bounty** » 2006-07-27 11:38am

Home consoles are getting exponentially more powerful and complex; the emulator developers can't keep up and the few emulators that get released have insanely high system requirements. The most advanced properly emulated console I know of is that GBA and that's only equivalent to mid-nineties hardware.

Furthermore, why haven't any of these companies considered that they could make more money selling an emulator for $50 than selling the system itself for $120?

Modern consoles have pretty much gone beyond the point where a mid-range PC could hope to emulate them with the degree of speed and accuracy needed in a commercial product.

Considering that the emulation of, say, the SNES - which uses mostly off-the-shelf chips and has been out for one and a half decade - is still not at 100%, is it any wonder the state-of-the-art consoles lag so far behind?

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2006-07-27 11:47am

I remember that many years ago a company was going to release a commerical PS emulator (was it Connectix? It was the same company that was known for its "Ram Doubler" program on the Mac), but Sony's lawyers crushed it, and I think that's pretty much discourage anyone from making any PS/PS2 emulators.

The Gamecube should be rather difficult to get ROMs for, since it spins its disks backwards (doesn't have other disc protection as well?). I'm pretty sure someone has ripped a Gamecube ROM, but its probably so difficult its not worth it. Also, you'd have to emulate PPC code on x86, which isn't a trivial task, and not knowing if the PPC is using little-endian or big-endian would make development harder (IIRC every PPC can do both, and the system developer specifies which one is being used). I have no idea how different the Flipper is from a PC GPU, so it could very well require some major emulation.

Now the Xbox would seem like the easiest, but you'd need to convert its APIs over Windows. Have fun reverse engineering your Xbox to get that code out. And you'd have to handle some specialized instructions for the Xbox's GPU (when Halo was ported to the PC, Gearbox had to replace some/all of the shader code). If you where to make an emulator, I'm pretty sure MS's lawyers would Borg your ass.

But generally speaking, its a matter of the shear complexity of the last generation of consoles. They have PC-like architectures, they have specialized instructions, and they are complex to develop for to begin with.

And, the consoles themselves are cheap, as Syntax already pointed out. Why bother with an emulator?

Edit: And Destructionator beat me to the post...

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-07-27 11:52am

That all makes sense, but I still don't understand why Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo don't make their own emulators and sell them for $50. The profit margins are higher than for the consoles themselves, and it wouldn't necessarily be easier to play pirated games than in the console itself if it were done right.

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2006-07-27 11:59am

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:That all makes sense, but I still don't understand why Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo don't make their own emulators and sell them for $50. The profit margins are higher than for the consoles themselves, and it wouldn't necessarily be easier to play pirated games than in the console itself if it were done right.

Because then you're making a PC game, and you'd be killing your brand at the same time. And you'd have to deal with all the PC headaches - different hardware configurations, different OSes, security issues, user interface, etc, all of which are fixed quantities on a console. Consoles are a lot simpler and a whole lot cheaper than a PC that's good for gaming, which is why they outsell PCs.

Bounty · Post by **Bounty** » 2006-07-27 12:21pm

The Gamecube should be rather difficult to get ROMs for, since it spins its disks backwards (doesn't have other disc protection as well?)

I thought all CDs spin clockwise? The GC discs do, as does my sister's stereo as far as I recall. I can't look at my CD drive for obvious reasons...

I'm pretty sure someone has ripped a Gamecube ROM, but its probably so difficult its not worth it.

Its is possible to rip a GC game and ISOs are known to exist, but I think those were made by exploiting a glitch in the modem. The images are also useless, since no emulator exists for them and the GC uses a custom CD format so you can't just burn one.

(ETA: you do mean ROMs as in disc images, not OS, right? Because the GC has one of those, too)

I still don't understand why Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo don't make their own emulators and sell them for $50

Have you ever heard anyone complain about setting up the plugins of their PSX emulator, even for homebrew? It'd be that times a thousand.
Another factor is that certian consoles just don't work without their hardware, because they use functions that are not possible to recreate through software emulation. I remember one of the SNES Final Fantasy games made one of it's sound effects by feeding the sound chip garbage data - there is, as far as I know, no way to get that to work on an emulator aside from hacks.

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2006-07-27 12:30pm

Bounty wrote:I thought all CDs spin clockwise? The GC discs do, as does my sister's stereo as far as I recall. I can't look at my CD drive for obvious reasons...

I've been told the GC spins opposite of a normal drive (this is from a friend that is a big Nintendo fan). A quick Google turns up nothing on normal drive direction.

ETA: you do mean ROMs as in disc images, not OS, right? Because the GC has one of those, too.

Yes, I mean disc images, not the console's own firmware.

Nephtys · Post by **Nephtys** » 2006-07-27 02:02pm

Arrow wrote:
Bounty wrote:I thought all CDs spin clockwise? The GC discs do, as does my sister's stereo as far as I recall. I can't look at my CD drive for obvious reasons...
I've been told the GC spins opposite of a normal drive (this is from a friend that is a big Nintendo fan). A quick Google turns up nothing on normal drive direction.

ETA: you do mean ROMs as in disc images, not OS, right? Because the GC has one of those, too.
Yes, I mean disc images, not the console's own firmware.

Xbox also spins opposite of a normal drive direction. The emulators exist for that, since an Xbox really is a PC but that drive thing's apparently a headache.

PS2 emulators suck just because the PS2 was coded like a peice of crap, with all kinds of pains brought on by 6 years and thousands of different titles released for it so I hear. It also doesn't help that the thing relied a ton on each system having identical hardware to push performance with it's weak specs.

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2006-07-27 02:27pm

Bounty wrote: Considering that the emulation of, say, the SNES - which uses mostly off-the-shelf chips and has been out for one and a half decade - is still not at 100%, is it any wonder the state-of-the-art consoles lag so far behind?

Except when you consider that the XBox is an off-the-shelf Pentium 3 with half the cache disabled, with an off the shelf Geforce 3, running a stripped down version of Windows...it really should not be very hard to emulate at all.

I've been told the GC spins opposite of a normal drive (this is from a friend that is a big Nintendo fan). A quick Google turns up nothing on normal drive direction.

IIRC, the rumor going around is that the GC reads data from the outside of the disk to the inside, rather than from the inside to the outside (spins the same direction, but the data is written 'backwards').

However, I don't know if this was ever proven.

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2006-07-27 02:39pm

Praxis wrote:Except when you consider that the XBox is an off-the-shelf Pentium 3 with half the cache disabled, with an off the shelf Geforce 3, running a stripped down version of Windows...it really should not be very hard to emulate at all.

There are enough differences to make emulation hard. I'm very certain there are special instructions in the Xbox GPU that aren't in a Geforce 3, and I have no idea if those functions ever made it into later generations of Geforce GPUs; if they are specific to the Xbox's graphics API (which I'm also certain isn't straight D3D), then Nvidia would have no reason to put them into later desktop GPUs. So you'd have to emulate those graphics instructions. And again, the Xbox APIs aren't direct copies of their PC counterparts, so those would have to be reverse engineered and implemented for Windows. That would be a long an difficult task (you'd have to reconstruct high level code from very optimized assemble - if you want to kill a few years of time, have fun).

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2006-07-27 03:37pm

The Geforce3 thats in the Xbox is a very differant beast, a maxed out GF3, rather then the simple product that made it to the commercial shelves.

Andrew J. · Post by **Andrew J.** » 2006-07-28 09:42am

Arrow wrote:I've been told the GC spins opposite of a normal drive (this is from a friend that is a big Nintendo fan). A quick Google turns up nothing on normal drive direction.

That's just an urban legend. It does read the disks differently, from the outside in.

Vendetta · Post by **Vendetta** » 2006-07-28 02:07pm

Arrow wrote:I remember that many years ago a company was going to release a commerical PS emulator (was it Connectix? It was the same company that was known for its "Ram Doubler" program on the Mac), but Sony's lawyers crushed it, and I think that's pretty much discourage anyone from making any PS/PS2 emulators.

Actually, Connectix and Bleem both produced commercial emulators, and Sony's lawyers were told to piss off when they tried to shut them down, as neither required any copyrighted Sony technology (like a system BIOS file).

They eventually faded out because they did not keep up with the non-commercial enthusiast emulators in terms of function or compatibility.

Eventually, Microsoft bought Connectix (who also produced VirtualPC).

Netko · Post by **Netko** » 2006-07-28 03:27pm

Its true that they managed to survive the lawsuits, but the litigation bled them, which contributed to them shutting down.