Console to PC Emulation

[xitel]

And Wii homebrews are awesome, wish I had the money to make the Wiimote work with my computer T_T

I'd be fine with a Wiimote that worked at all.

Wiimotes work fine if you tune it properly and get rid of any extraneous infrared sources near your TV, not really a complaint

Not if you chuck it through your TV. Then they're both buggered.

I cleverly managed to step around this problem, by not chucking it through my TV.

That is ingenious! How did you come up with that marvelous plan!?

 

[runtheplacered]

Everybody is wrong. The reason it's so hard is because as people get better at hacking, software developers make a stronger level of data encryption to protect against it. The only way people will ever have a long-term encryptian bypass is to solve the Reimann hypothesis.

you're kidding.......right?...

I have a feeling he wasn't, sadly.

Ok woah, woah, woah, I was kidding. Don't make me out to be an idiot > Though it has become apparent that nobody will get the referance.

haha, Ok. Sorry about that. Hard to tell kidding from real statements on the interwebs. And nope, I didn't catch the reference, sadly.

 

[Ago Iterum]

And Wii homebrews are awesome, wish I had the money to make the Wiimote work with my computer T_T

I'd be fine with a Wiimote that worked at all.

Wiimotes work fine if you tune it properly and get rid of any extraneous infrared sources near your TV, not really a complaint

Not if you chuck it through your TV. Then they're both buggered.

I cleverly managed to step around this problem, by not chucking it through my TV.

That is ingenious! How did you come up with that marvelous plan!?

Well I was having a laugh and a drink with god one day, talking about what a ***** it was that so many TV's were getting broken by the Wii. So we did a little bit of thinking, (bearing in mind I was pretty drunk) and I proposed an idea called 'grip'. He totally wasn't on board with it, so I went home. The next day, I wake up, and everybody's gripping things.

And worst of all, he gets all the praise for it.

Always patent, kids!

 

[Asehujiko]

As soon as consoles start using x86 cpu's, it should be praciticaly possible to make them run as paralel os on a pc or the other way arround. that way you can have one machine capable of playing both crysis, halo 3, ssbb and mgs4 as long as you plug in the correct controller(a logitech G11/15 and a Novint Falcon should cover everything nicely). But alas, MS will be too greedy to give up xbl, sony too snobbing to associate with anything "below" them and nintendo will have their hands full of making the wii seem more innovative then it realy is, lest they go under at 8th gen.

The pc is ready for the fusion. We only await awnsers from the consoles.

 

[irrelevantnugget]

That is ingenious! How did you come up with that marvelous plan!?

Not playing anything, I suppose.

 

[forever saturday]

different games have different engines which all work differently. also, the reason an xbox isnt just a computer is that it basically has a very different operating system. this is why you cant just put a pc game in an xbox and play it.

 

[Wicky_42]

Forever saturday's missing the point of emulation, obviously, lol. Yeah, it was the PS1 emulator that allowed you to run the game from the disk in a PC that got me thinking about this.

Basically, to read through the responses, the key hardware difference is in the processor, a custom-built beasty with three cores n other funky stuff. So, essentially, the major hurdle would be that the power needed to emulate that much processing from within windows would require a vastly more powerful rig. So would making a version of the console bios/operating system and setting it up as an alternative boot partition help alleviate the problem?

I've got a Core 2 quad core processor, a 8800 GT graphics card and 4 GB of ram, so in terms of raw power there's enough there to run a xbox game. The issue, I guess, is the differences in processing methods - the xbox, as far as I can see, does a large chunk of its graphics processing on its cpu, whilst PCs generally make more use of the graphics card. Could they not share the load more? Or is that hard-coded into how the game runs?

 

[number2301]

I'd say the number one thing keeping it from happening is the legal issue. There was a software released back in the PS1 era that actually allowed you to play PS1 games on your PC. You inserted the PS1 disk into your computer and everything. I remember seeing it in Best Buy.

I can't remember what the software was called, but I remember there was a legal firestorm over it. Eventually the product was deemed to be legal, but the company that developed it had lost so much money in legal fees due to Sony's lawsuits that they eventually filed for bankruptcy.

Does anyone else remember what it was called? It's driving me crazy.

Bleem, and the reason there was such an uproar about it was that it was so good Sony thought it had been reverse engineered. I remember playing Metal Gear Solid using Bleem, was spot on right up until the boss fight where you had to use the second pad.

 

[Da_Schwartz]

Or ya could just buy cosole games for a console and when you have a game thats also pc go that route. I mean..that's what i do. Just buy it. -.-

 

[xenus87]

PS2 emulation is coming along quite well, although there are a hell of a lot of games that wont work with it yet, or are incredibly buggy if they actually load.

God of war 2 is one game that has major graphical problems once you get in game, although the FMVs work fine, the sound also has a strange 'echo' to it as well.

This is it running on my pc at the moment from an image ripped from my own disc :-

http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c170/blackrainbow666/GoW1.jpg
http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c170/blackrainbow666/GoW2.jpg

And this is what its like in game:-

http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c170/blackrainbow666/GoW3.jpg

You do need a fairly fast processor to get the games on there to run at more than a crawl due to all the work being forced onto it and you graphics card sitting there doing nothing.

 

[antipunt]

PS2 emulation is coming along quite well, although there are a hell of a lot of games that wont work with it yet, or are incredibly buggy if they actually load.

God of war 2 is one game that has major graphical problems once you get in game, although the FMVs work fine, the sound also has a strange 'echo' to it as well.

You do need a fairly fast processor to get the games on there to run at more than a crawl due to all the work being forced onto it and you graphics card sitting there doing nothing.

Long story short IMO Is that emulation has reached kinda a plateau in terms of progress. Seeing that the ps2 emulator is still so heavily in its 'experimental stages', and that its been so freaking long, we can kiss goodbye any prospects for emulators for next-gen (unless your next-gen is referring to the gamecube or original xbox =P)

 

[Powerhelix]

I dont know if anyone mentioned this, but the creation of an emulator is... well... illegal... it is breaking into coding that is pattented and redistributing it amongst the population... Even if I, say, had a 360 emulator I couldn't sell it or go public with it because I would lose EVERYTHING and more... So I'm sure there are people with emulators out there but they wont share lol

 

[antipunt]

I dont know if anyone mentioned this, but the creation of an emulator is... well... illegal... it is breaking into coding that is pattented and redistributing it amongst the population... Even if I, say, had a 360 emulator I couldn't sell it or go public with it because I would lose EVERYTHING and more... So I'm sure there are people with emulators out there but they wont share lol

you sound so 'sure' of yourself [rolls eyes]. Read some previous posts in the thread, an emulator is NOT illegal. I repeat. =P

 

[xenus87]

Encryption and Legal protections:
As has been mentioned, most consoles have their main firmwares and operating software protected by technical and legal means. You can emulate the hardware all you want, but the second you start touching proprietary, protected firmwares and code... You just opened up a "Can 'o' Gray Zone". The laws regarding reverse engineering proprietary software are at best contradictory to each other. And as usual in most court systems, the one with the most money usually wins.

"EMUNAME does however require a real PS2 BIOS to run. However, you must obtain this from your own PS2, as the BIOS binary is copyrighted by SONY and cannot be distributed with EMUNAME as this would be highly illegal. This is perhaps the only technical thing you will have to do to get EMUNAME running games, but there are guides and tools out there to help you do this.

Taken from the readme of the PS2 emulator.

Dumping your own set of BIOS from your own console is rather easy, and these emulator programmers know that, so any requests on their forums for posting up BIOS sets, or actually posting links to them anywhere on the internet is rewarded with an instant ban, and have been know to report people to authorities in the past for distributing them on their personal web spaces.

"Whilst EMUNAME is capable of playing 'backups', it is not the intention of the authors to provide a means to play illegaly copied games. It is however the intention of the authors to let you play (once hardware is capable) PS2 games on your PC's, with the enhancements emulation allows, such as save-states, high resolution graphics, infinte memory cards, cross-region support etc."

In a way, you can understand why they want to do it, as a hobby, pure technical challenge, or to just improve on the gaming 'experience', but due to how easy it is to get hold of 'backups' of games on the internet these days, it no wonder the console companies keep a close watch on the projects to make sure none of their code is being distributed illegally with the emulator.

Another good thing about this emulator, is that it is completely open source, and there are plenty of tools out there to decompile the files to check what is actually in there in case you don't trust them.