Setting Up Ubuntu On a PS3 For Emulation

Gizmodo is running a guide on how to install Ubuntu on a Playstation 3 and set it up to play vintage games through emulation. Quoting: "It still kind of surprises me (in a good way) that Sony was, from the start, very OK with PS3 owners tinkering with Linux on their PS3s. A modified release of Yellow Dog Linux was available from the very beginning, and some very handy hard drive partitioning and dual-boot utilities are baked right into the PS3's XMB; Ubuntu gets installed on an entirely separate partition of your PS3's hard disk, so your default system doesn't get touched and switching between Ubuntu and the XMB is a piece of cake. There is a flipside to this coin, however. Since the PS3's Cell Processor is PowerPC based, you won't be able to use any Linux software that's compiled for x86, which is, unfortunately, most of it. However, Ubuntu has always had a PPC distro, and most of the basic stuff will work just fine. You can even load up a PPC-compiled Super Nintendo Emulator, SNES9X, and play some classic games pretty easily on your Sixaxis controller paired via Bluetooth."

VM hacking?

[Anthony_Cargile]

Would it be too slow to load a slim PPC kernel and replace init with an optimized PPC-compiled qemu instance (basically; it would require much more than this) and run a virtual x86 machine on that? It seems the downsize would be: two kernels and an image in non-volatile storage, (although they aren't that big, not much difference), RAM would be a premium, consider some paging (and a minimalistic hypervisor kernel running a slim custom client kernel, goodbye canonical support), and those Cell CPUs would fare just fine with it.

It seems like a long shot, but it could work with at the very least "decent" results, after a fair amount of hacking and gnu optimization (store more crap on the registers than RAM). Compiz would kill on those graphics cards, and if paging is light you could have project 64 running in WINE for the best Nintendo 64 experience since... the Nintendo 64! Gee Willigers!

That is, assuming qemu can do x86->PPC, else find an alternative (or write one, hey!)

SNES, NES, Genesis. You can't go wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

A roommate of mine that has unfortunately moved out has a PS3 and a big HDTV. We spent a lot of time playing PS3. Some of those new games look amazing in HD... really amazing.

Despite this, we spent a lot more time playing roms under ubuntu. I've always used ZSNES on my computers, but unfortunately some of it is written in X86 compiler. SNES9X works great on PS3 ubuntu though, and finding emulators for other systems compiled for PPC really isn't hard at all.