cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/49514337
Their compatibility list notes 75.33% are Playable, 22.93% can go in-game but not be finished and only 1.69% can’t get past the intro.
Maybe I don’t need to bother fixing my PS3.
Do it anyway for the skillgain, the e-waste prevention, and bragging rights. 🤙
I only have one because I always wanted to have all 7th gen consoles back in the day but could only have one.
The fat PS3 was a great deal because it could run Linux and natively play PS2 games as well. I haven’t been into consoles since the fat PS3, they have all gotten worse and worse IMO. I did buy a Steam Deck and really like it, if that counts as a console.
The power supply on my fat PS3 recently quit on me. It feels like the old YLOD but happens the moment the power supply kicks in instead of taking 10 seconds or so. Fingers crossed I can find a doner supply, it’ll be a while before I get to it though.
Fingers crossed I can find a doner supply 🥙😋
Oh my Lord… I think you just predicted dinner!
That’s impressive.
At my work, we had these cell processor-based blade servers for a while. Basically the same chips as in a PS3 except they could handle double-precision floats. We wanted to use them for scientific modelling, but gave up eventually. They were such a bitch to program! I can only imagine emulating them must’ve been a nightmare.
Whoa what do you do? That sounds super fascinating!
It’s a small company that does mineral surveying, but we’ve done a lot of R&D in the past that ranged from designing our own survey instrumentation to writing geophysical modelling software. The Cell thing was for the latter.
IIRC the Cell processor was built around an IBM PowerPC, but that wasn’t meant to do all the heavy lifting. Rather, it was supposed to be farmed out to these other processing nodes (I forget what they were called), almost like using a GPU for general computation. Now, the IBM consultant sold us on the Cell, saying they had an OpenCL library that would make all this much easier and hide the hardware details. LOL!
First of all, it was a 32-bit library. Maybe fine for a 32-bit console like the PS3, but our blades had 16 GB of RAM and it wasn’t going to cut it. So I had to dig into the guts of the architecture to get anything usable and, long story short, a summer went by and I had little to show for my efforts.
Years later, we eventually got the program running on Threadrippers and that worked out much better!
What was the justification to buy them in the first place?
I guess you could say the Cell was as an 8-core CPU (well, 9, if you include the PowerPC in the middle) at a time when such things were unheard of, at least in the consumer space. So the theoretical performance if you could max out all those cores was through the roof. I have no doubt that’s what drew Sony to them for their next gen console.
But whereas all the cores of a modern 8-core chip can access the same RAM, in the Cell, only the PowerPC could access the main memory and each core had its own dedicated internal RAM, meaning you had to load both code and data into all the cores laboriously yourself using asynchronous DMA requests before executing the code, and then sync the results back using more DMA. It was a bit like GPU programming, I suppose, though within the cores, it felt more like a CPU in terms of the instruction set and what not, so kind of a hybrid approach I guess?
But is Demons Souls one of them?
Yep, just played It last week.
This is really impressive, but it’s also a bit of a shame about the timing since so many great games from PS3 were already ported to PC, like Bloodborne, RDR, Last of Us or Uncharted
When was Bloodborne ported to PC?
Only Uncharted 4 is available on PC, none of the PS3 era games are available, sadly. I haven’t tried on the most recent version of the emulator, but:
- Uncharted 1, 2: Completed all the way through
- Uncharted 3: Got to the final level, but couldn’t complete it. It also crashed a LOT, and there are several janky spots with crazy slow downs etc. like the ship graveyard. It’s also a bit annoying to get running in the first place. The recommended settings are actually required in my experience. Doesn’t work without them.
I love me some Uncharted! Emulator is going to be the best way to play them soon. It’s already superior imo because I was able to set up gyro aim
edit: I’m misremembering the games. It was 3 that I couldn’t complete due to the demon hallucination things causing a crash, not 2
Might want to get into this. Would this emulator allow me to play off disks in my Blu-ray drive? Or will I need to find/make disk images?
Would this emulator allow me to play off disks in my Blu-ray drive?
Signs point to no, at least due to DRM (?) many PC blu-ray drives aren’t capable of reading PS3 discs. Technically possible if you buy a specific drive (or maybe altering a drive?), otherwise you probably would need a PS3 with custom firmware to rip your own games.
EDIT, More directly:
In its current state, RPCS3 does not support reading game data directly from PlayStation 3 format discs.
Just saying for most of these games emulation is probably pointless if game has PC port.
They should focus on exclusives and games with lacking PC port.
They don’t work so you can play (pirated) games, they work because building a near-complete emulator is demanding and satisfying work.
