I have been getting into emulation though there is no emulation community here to talk about it. I assume emulation discussion in gaming is welcome any thoughts?
I have been getting into emulation though there is no emulation community here to talk about it. I assume emulation discussion in gaming is welcome any thoughts?
I mostly only emulate playstation games.(pcsx and pcsx2) I did try an NES emulator for a romhack which was nice. Recently I tried Aethersx which is a fork of pcsx2 but for android. A lot has changed since a few years ago I remember pcsx2 lagging alot but now it runs pretty smooth.
Playstation 2 is already solid, that’s for sure. Since my new PC from last year, I am also able to emulate Playstation 3 (some claim even the Steam Deck is capable of doing so, but I’m not sure how good). And PSP emulator runs on most computers nowadays. We even enter in emulating a Playstation 4, but off course this is in early stages at the moment.
So yeah, there is lot of Playstation food for the coming years for you. :D Its really exciting. I still need to figure out PS Vita, and didn’t get into it yet. The original Playstation is still my biggest Sony love I have and probably right behind my favorite console, the SNES.
Romhacks are also huge part of why I love the emulation scene. If you allow me to plug an article I wrote, with lot of Romhacks and Mods for NES as a recommendation. There is so much cool stuff out there: https://thingsiplay.game.blog/2023/02/18/nes-mods-and-romhacks-collection/
Someone even ported the original NES Super Mario Bros to SNES, and then modified that to add in a Super Mario Maker style editor; on the SNES! I can’t link it here if you are interested, unfortunately I only know a prepatched ROM source for it. And that is not something this community / place allows to link.
When I heard of ps4 emulation I thought it was amazing since I still have not tried emulating ps3 but I remember it use to be only for high end machines. I also assume ps5 emulation will be a thing eventually but I think it will be a while. I am curious how psx3 runs compared to psx2 since pcsx2 lagged when I first used it years ago. But now its runs about the same as the ps1 version. I imagine ps3 is probably more complicated to emulate than ps4 due to the architecture though.
Exactly (referring to more complicated), you are right about the architecture. The PS3 is that complicated, not even Sony themselves have a working emulator for their catalog of games in Playstation monthly subscriptions. Sony emulates PS1 and 2, and PS3 is only streaming and PS4 games are directly compatible with PS5. That’s because PS4 and 5 are similar in the architecture and basically a PC (obviously there is more to it, but CPU is similar).
And that’s why the most advanced PS4 emulator, ChadPS4 … I mean ShadPS4 (the community makes jokes and calls it Chad), doesn’t actually emulate the CPU entirely! Because its similar to a PC CPU, it can use lot of instructions directly. There are other PS4 emulators who try to emulate it entirely, like a traditional emulator.
As for PS3, it is still not in a state like PS2 emulator. Some games work fine and I can play lot of them in full speed without major or any issues. It’s under heavy development still. Some games still are totally unplayable. And depending on how heavy a game is, it can be really demanding on the current modern PCs (I know its a vague statement, its hard to make exact statement for situations like these). I think its still a few years away from how the PS2 performs right now. And then the question if anyone wants to port the emulator to a different architecture… phew!