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.
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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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.
The Wii U was just a souped up Wii so of course the emulation scene had a Wii U emulator in no time.
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.
For profit corporations should not be trusted to preserve out culture. They would happily delete everything it if made then 1 dollar
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.
The PS3 is the epitome of "idiots admire complexity [...]" it was needlessly complicated with its cell architecture.
I think the world has learned from this, since we're abstracting and decoupling much more than before, as well as developing new and modernising old tooling all the time to lower that barrier to entry.
Shout outs to the game Devs who had to deal with this shit for 3 years straight, as their keyboards were probably salty from all the crying, their rubber ducky all crumpled and deflated.
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?