ps2 emulators

seeing as how sony all but shut down Bleem i think a ps2 emulator will be unlikely.

cyn

See things this way...

Sony makes a PS2 for $500 (just a guess, I may be wrong, but I do know that they loose money from each system sold). They sell the system for $300 resulting in a loss of $200. If they dont sell that system, though, its a loss of $500. If they did make an emulator, they''d probably have to stop selling systems because no one would be buying them and they''d keep loosing hundreds of dollars for each emulator they sell. Now you see why companies don''t favor emulators? On its highest level, one would think by making an emulator, you''re saving Sony the $200 it looses on a system, but in reality, all you''d be doing is depriving Sony of $500. Geddit now?

Johnny Watson
Owner/Main Programmer Vigasotech, Inc.

They lose money!! :p , so they rely on people buying games and accesories to make money, right?

Website:PC-Gaming

MSN messenger:garcon_bifteck@hotmail.com

Email:garconbifteck@pc-gaming.com

Supposedly sony doesnt loose money on ps2s. your thinking of the xbox and i heard that sega used to loose money for each console they sold. i keep hearing this and seeing it debunked as a rumor. my guess is that because it was so publicised that ms looses money on the xboxes they sell its assumed that money is lost on all consoles. dont flame me if im wrong, but please show me some proof.

Actually most consoles do loose money for the first couple years. During this time they rely on software royalties(they get like 10 bucks for every game sold) and hardware royalties(no idea how much.) Yes the Xbox is loosing somewhere between 100-200 bucks per console. MS is doing this to ensure a future in the console market, they don''t even plan to turn a profit until Xbox 2 from what I''ve heard. Sony and nintendo are both loosing money on their new consoles as well but probably not quite as much as Xbox. Then again MS can afford it.

Check out Edge (UK) #104 p. 21:

quote:

---

Expected loss made by MS for each Xbox sold:
USD 100 - USD 150 (GBP 68 - GBP 102)

Expected loss made by Sony for each PS2 sold:
JPY 10,000 (GBP 57)

Expected loss made by Nintendo for each GameCube sold:
JPY 3,000 - JPY 3,500 (GBP 17 - GBP 20)

---

I assume part of the loss comes from other factors than production like development and marketing. With marketing maybe even more than production and development but together considering the enormous adventising campaigns.

Jasper

I would think Sony does _not_ actually lose money on console hardware. I don''t know for sure, of course, but seeing as how Sony is a huge player in the consumer electronics business, it seems reasonable to assume they have the expertise to manufacture PS2s and still make some profit. After all, they make profit on their other hardware (TVs, CD players, etc.)

As for why they would not like a PS2 emulator, the answer is probably "control", if not a loss of revenue. Sony wants to control who''s playing games on their system, and wants to make sure it has control over its brand name. They don''t want you playing PS2 games on a PS2 emulator because that emulator isn''t made by Sony, and they won''t make a PS2 emulator because they want you to buy a PS2 and the "console experience" that comes with that. Otherwise, you''d just be playing games in a buggy and slow (modern PCs could not emulate a PS2 at a playable speed) PC program.

We won''t be seeing PS2 emulation any time soon, if ever, anyway...

---
Bart

If I uinderstand the situation correctly the PS2 still has a WORD size of 32 bits. Its 128-bit in the way that my diamond stealth was 128 bit like 6 years ago. IE: It has a wide 4 channel bus, but the various CPU's generally process at 32 bits each.

The PS2 architecture would be very difficult to emulate for a more pertinent reason, however. It is more like a collection of different specialized processors (graphics, sound, etc...) with a fairly weak central CPU that acts more like a scheduler to keep all of the other stuff in sync. Instead of having a single big system bus that connects the CPU to basically everything else...the PS2 has a very wide system bus that shuttles information from place to place.
The system leans on this bus because the designers felt like it could handle transferring data across the bus almost every frame. In a way this is neccesary to support the multi-step design of the PS2, and in a way it was a pipe dream. This is precisely why so many games suffer from strange periods of slow-down.. the bus, while wide, is not wide enough to pull in lots of new information.
[
A prime example is many of the EA Sports games. In NCAA 2002, when the play ends, often players will perform some special animation or do something otherwise out of the norm for the game. This requires a ton of information to be shuttled on the bus... which becomes a bottle-neck and leads to slow down. This is because these scenes violate very clearly the principle of locality on which the architecture is based.


Emulating this on the PC would be a frigging disaster. The X86 oeprates in the exact opposite manner. We like to have ultra large chunks of memory close to the processor (RAM) with a relatively slim bus (32 bits). If a game can fit in available RAM it will run very well and the location of assets will always be predictable. Emulating a PS2 program would likely lead to a serious bottleneck as the PC bus can simply not handle the large amounts of data being transferred across it.

You might be able to get away with some cleverness where you cache the assets in main memory and redirect calls to retrieve those assets directly to RAM, but i'm not sure of what exactly that would take as I am not intimately familiar with the hardware itself.

I think a more conforming architecture like the Gamecube (and of course the XBox) are more likely candidates for emulation.

Nick Pleis
"Game Programming for the PalmOS" Available February 2002

Edited by - enjolras on January 11, 2002 10:12:01 AM

quote:

---

Original post by Enjolras

The PS2 architecture would be very difficult to emulate for a more pertinent reason, however. It is more like a collection of different specialized processors (graphics, sound, etc...) with a fairly weak central CPU that acts more like a scheduler to keep all of the other stuff in sync.

Emulating this on the PC would be a frigging disaster. The X86 oeprates in the exact opposite manner. We like to have ultra large chunks of memory close to the processor (RAM) with a relatively slim bus (32 bits).

I think a more conforming architecture like the Gamecube (and of course the XBox) are more likely candidates for emulation.

---

I''ve heard this argument before about emulating systems. The system architecture is too radically different from PC system architecture. The processors are different, the console has multiple processors where the PC has one main one. The whole concept of processing data is different. And I believed most of it, until an N64 emulator came out. How can a 64bit cpu be mimiced by a 32bit cpu? It is because an emulator _is_ the bridge between the two systems. The program is written to translate the differences between the two systems. Both systems, in this case, are Turing machines, and therefore can be emulated by the other.

quote:

---

Original post by Anonymous Poster
It would not be terribly difficult to write a PS2 emulator on a PC, as emulators go. Far stranger architectures have been emulated. What would be difficult with today''s hardware would be writing a PS2 emulator than can run at the same speed as a hardware PS2. (One that you could reasonably play games on)

Emulating 128 bits at 300Mhz would be pretty difficult on consumer grade intel hardware.

---

The CPU in reality isn''t 128 bits as the CPU bit size is defined by their integer size which is probably 32 bits as no higher classified CPU''s exist. It''s all just a marketing scam to sell more consoles. The 128 bits they''re talking about is the floating point bus which operates at 4 single precision (32 bits) floating point numbers at one time (4x4 matrices, you get the picture).
Since the Pentium 4 has SSE2 which can also process 4 32 bit floating point numbers at any time, this wouldn''t really be the hardest part to emulate. Intel could even market it as a 128 bit CPU like Sony does Anyway I doubt the possibility of a PS2 emulator as described by reasons above, a completely different architecture.

Jasper

quote:

---

Original post by Johnny_W
Sony makes a PS2 for $500 (just a guess, I may be wrong, but I do know that they loose money from each system sold). They sell the system for $300 resulting in a loss of $200. If they dont sell that system, though, its a loss of $500. If they did make an emulator, they''d probably have to stop selling systems because no one would be buying them and they''d keep loosing hundreds of dollars for each emulator they sell. Now you see why companies don''t favor emulators? On its highest level, one would think by making an emulator, you''re saving Sony the $200 it looses on a system, but in reality, all you''d be doing is depriving Sony of $500. Geddit now?

---

Assume for a second that it IS possible to make an emulator that runs well on the average PC. Then sony could STOP building the $500 machines, and start making $1 CDs carrying the emulating software. If they sold each CD for $50, that''d be a profit of $49, as opposed to a loss of $200.

My main point is just to highlight the fact that it is not immediately obvious that making emulators is a bad idea.

Of course, when you start considering things like widespread piracy, and the counter-productivity of forcing a machine to work in a way other than the way it was designed when the way it was designed is ALREADY capable of running some pretty fantastic games.. If I were Sony I wouldn''t want to release an emulator just so that I wouldn''t have to say I made a machine that cost me $500 and then wrote a program to do the same thing that cost me essentially nothing to duplicate.

I am not arguing that it is not possible to emulate a PS2. I AM arguing that it is especially difficult to imagine that the PS2 could be efficiently emulated on the PC and that is a BIG difference. As my post indicated, a variety of architecture reasons exist to make the PS2 a rather poor choice for emulation.. I did not say it was impossible, as a matter of fact it would not be terribly difficult. However, I do not think that the PC can efficiently emulate the PS2 for simple memory bottleneck issues. The PS2 is designed with a high bandwidth bus and the PC simply isn''t.

I''m sorry if my post was unclear...

quote:

---

Original post by rileyriley
Assume for a second that it IS possible to make an emulator that runs well on the average PC. Then sony could STOP building the $500 machines, and start making $1 CDs carrying the emulating software. If they sold each CD for $50, that''d be a profit of $49, as opposed to a loss of $200.

My main point is just to highlight the fact that it is not immediately obvious that making emulators is a bad idea.

---

Let''s assume for a moment that they could come up with an emulator that runs fast enough on the average PC. Suddenly, sales of the PS2 would drop (probably not to nothing, but there would be a big decrease). Within a year or two, there would be more people out there running the emulator than those who actually own the console, possibly by a big margin. So, say my company is developing games for the PS2 (which happens to be the case, but that''s irrelevant). I''m no longer really making games for the PS2, I''m making games for people who are running a PS2 emulator on their PC. Why, then, should I bother developing for the PS2 at all? I could just develop for the PC instead. Sure, I''d lose those potential customers that still have just the console, but I''d pick up PC users who don''t have the console or emulator. What''s more, I''d no longer have to pay a licensing fee to Sony to release games for their system. Pretty soon, the number of games coming out for the PS2 would slow to a trickle, as would Sony''s profits.

So, there''s another reason emulators are a bad idea in their eyes.

Myopic Rhino: while i agree with you on that point. i do one potential benefit of emulators. a) it allows hobbyist and newbie programmers a virtual platform as a stepping stone to understanding console programming (which is little different than developing for the PC). i personally coded a MIPS R3xxx emulator and this helped me understand the MIPS architecture a lot better, as i did not have a MIPS platform to program on before i hax0r'd my PS2.

it's easy to be heavy when you're on the inside, but when you're not...

To the vast majority of mankind, nothing is more agreeable than to escape the need for mental exertion... To most people, nothing is more troublesome than the effort of thinking.

Edit: also, i would like to add that i don't think it would IMPOSSIBLE to emulate the PS2 at all. in fact i had the basic CPU and vu0 COP2 instructions emulated fairly quickly. with techniques like "dynamic compilation" i could see 10-20 fps very possible with a high-end PC (P4 1.5GHz+, Geforce3, etc). of course this is MHO.

Edited by - jenova on January 14, 2002 4:34:20 PM

the ps2 also only has 32meg of ram with a 4meg video card. while many pcs today have 128meb to 256meg of ram. video cards range from 32meg to 64meg. agp increases the ram a video card can access quickly, but that would not be needed since most games were designed with the 4meg vram limitation. also dont forget todays video cards can use compressed textures while the ps2 cannot thus increasing the availible storage on the pc video card to cache even more texture data. while the multi cpu architecture is a problem due to complex timing and very likly using custom chips with little documentation. the bus bandwidth is not a problem as you think. just because the ps2 has to move data across a bus does not mean the pc must move the data. realize that the reults moving across the bus are mostly results of moving data from system ram to vram. something not required much by pc video cards. (dont forget as well that many ps2 games ran at 640x240 due to vram limitations) i am not saying it will be easy for the person/group that does it (as it will be done), just that many ppl ignore just how talented some programmers are. with dynamic recompiling, i am sure that at least early games will be playable on 1.5ghz system. dont forget everyone said playable n64 emulation could only be done on a 1ghz pc, which was proved quite wrong with ultraHLE.

as to bleem, it was crap, but the first psx emulator to not require any bios making it 100% legal to distribute as a complete working emulator. while emulators using the bios could not be distributed with the bios thus requiring the user to grab the bios themselves via gameshark (or the net). though those free psx emulators rival ps2 in capatibility and graphics quality.

quote:

---

Original post by jenova
Myopic Rhino: while i agree with you on that point. i do one potential benefit of emulators. a) it allows hobbyist and newbie programmers a virtual platform as a stepping stone to understanding console programming (which is little different than developing for the PC). i personally coded a MIPS R3xxx emulator and this helped me understand the MIPS architecture a lot better, as i did not have a MIPS platform to program on before i hax0r''d my PS2.

---

I agree with you, but I think a few people are trying to come up with good reasons that it would be in Sony''s best interest to release an emulator. I was just pointing out what (I think) is one reason Sony would never want to do that. I''m not at all saying that others wouldn''t benefit from an emulator.

quote:

---

Original post by Johnny_W
See things this way...

Sony makes a PS2 for $500 (just a guess, I may be wrong, but I do know that they loose money from each system sold). They sell the system for $300 resulting in a loss of $200. If they dont sell that system, though, its a loss of $500. If they did make an emulator, they''d probably have to stop selling systems because no one would be buying them and they''d keep loosing hundreds of dollars for each emulator they sell. Now you see why companies don''t favor emulators? On its highest level, one would think by making an emulator, you''re saving Sony the $200 it looses on a system, but in reality, all you''d be doing is depriving Sony of $500. Geddit now?

Johnny Watson
Owner/Main Programmer Vigasotech, Inc.

---

This is wrong. They WOULD be $200 better off, because they aren''t losing $500 if they don''t have to make the system in the first place. They make more on the games than the systems anyway, so I don''t see why an emulator doesn''t make sense, so long as you can prevent people from pirating the games.

AP: while it is true that the PS2 has 128-bit instructions that can be executed in 1 cycle (barring pipeline stalls), i could easily see many of the vu0 (in cop2 macromode) being emulated by P3 SSE instructions. furthermore the MMU instructions (MMX type instructions) again can be emulated by MMX itself (tho, you''ll see a performance hit for the "emms" instruction). secondly, with dynamic compilation you can start weeding out unnecessary performance hits. think the hardest parts of the emulation would have to "vu0/1" running microcode, as well as the IOP, and doing this in parallel to the CPU core. but again, i ain''t talking about emulating this on a PII Celeron 600MHz (don''t even consider it). i''m talking high-end machine.

NOTE: i wonder how the Itanium would do? it''s a nice peice of hardware.

To the vast majority of mankind, nothing is more agreeable than to escape the need for mental exertion... To most people, nothing is more troublesome than the effort of thinking.

quote:

---

Original post by jenova
i do one potential benefit of emulators. a) it allows hobbyist and newbie programmers a virtual platform as a stepping stone to understanding console programming (which is little different than developing for the PC).

---

Frankly put, nobody gives a fuck about hobbyist and newbie developers. That''s what PCs are for. Once you can program for the PC of your choice - yes, including Mac or whatever - (and understand its assembly language), you get a licensed developers kit through the company you work for and learn the console. Which is yet another avenue of revenue for the console manufacturers.

I fail to understand why so many people think console manufacturers are/should be benevolent. This is business; ergo, it''s all about the benjamins.

Conclusion: emulators do not work in the favor of any closed, proprietary technology manufacturer, which is why they pursue emulator developers (unless their systems are out of production). In that case, they require you to have purchased the original software (see MAME issues).

[ GDNet Start Here | GDNet FAQ | MS RTFM | STL | Google ]
Thanks to Kylotan for the idea!