Emulation Explosion On the PS3 Via Linux 425
Marty writes "The PlayStation 3 has recently seen an explosion
of releases of emulators and games for the Yellow Dog Linux distro for PS3;
once you have installed Yellow
Dog Linux you then have the ability to try out MAME,
SNES, Amiga, Dos,
Commodore and Atari
emulators (that's the tip of the iceberg) and such games as Quake
2, Duke Nukem 3D, Hexen 2 and Alephone. Time to start installing Linux on your PS3?"
Oblig. (Score:5, Funny)
I now feel somewhat happier.
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Re:Oblig. (Score:4, Funny)
You misspelled the typo. It's "I herd you liek[...]"
I don't know how to feel about that...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Grammar Nazis for internet memes. *Now* I have seen everything.
No (Score:4, Informative)
1. First of all, there are more options for PS3 then YD including Gentoo, Ubuntu, Fedora, and others.
2. Access (due to Sony scared of people making good games for PS3 Linux for 'free') to the RSX (graphics card) is very restricted. A few firmware revisions ago it was accessible but of course that gets fixed. And without the latest firmware, you cannot play certain games.
The PS3 is a flop anyway. If you want to emulate these mentioned systems, you are way better off with a PC, Xbox 1, or Wii.
Re:No (Score:4, Informative)
Flop? I don't think that word means what you think it means.
PS3 has made money. It might not have caught on like the creators hoped it would or like the PS2, but it is slowly getting its market share.
It isn't a huge success story but I'd hardly call it a flop.
Re:No (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know. When the company claims that a product is still for "early adapters" two years after it's release...that's almost flop-worthy.
Re:No (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No (Score:5, Informative)
No, PS3 has not made any money and it may never make any.
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/fr/index.html [sony.net]
Sony videogames division in the past three years (PS3 era+R&D, including PS2 and PSP):
2006 ===== 75 (positive)
2007 = -1,969 (negative)
2008 = -1,265 (negative)
2009 ===== 51 (positive)
Total 2006-09 === -3,108
(in million US$)
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=111003 [neogaf.com]
Re:No (Score:5, Interesting)
I haven't been keeping track of consoles much, but I can imagine that being true, from how many kids I've (dismayingly) heard talking about their XBoxes. Also, many kids and adults (a niche market which Playstations have traditionally been strong in) have gone with Wii.
I've definitely do idea on the veracity of those figures. BUT, even if they've lost a ton of money on PS3, there is perhaps still light at the end of the tunnel for Sony. They based it on Cell, which is designed to scale easily. If that really happened in practice, and if the PS3 didn't bypass all that and just use the raw power without the scaleability, then it should be a relatively simple process to make a PS4, based on their existing, mass-producible tech, but with a few more Cell chips on the bus.
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no, but I am... hah, damn quote marks.
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No. The small EDRAM is not the sole reason games aren't pushing 720p. It's because the graphice hardware in both consoles cannot display 1280x720+ without giving-up framerate or details. Since details sell (why they keep increasing), and framerate is mandatory, designers have been pushing things at the cost of resolution.
Even many PS3 games don't run at 720p these days, and there's no EDRAM to make that happen.
I owned a 7900, and I'm well-aware of what it can do. Oblivion brought the card to it's knees
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All this fanboy talk can cease. [wikia.com]
Sony's gaming division lost $1.24 billion in 2008. This means that anyone who lost less than 1.24 billion dollars in 2008 is more profitable than Sony's gaming division. Sony did NOT make money on the PS3 in 2008.
That said, your other statement is more accurate. Third party developers have finally stepped up and begun releasing games people might actually want to play, and Sony finally lowered the price of the console, leading to an increase in sales of 156%. Their share of th
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
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The one thing i love about PS3 haters is that they try to state that each console are sold at a loss.
but there's no way to actually *prove* that with out Sony actually saying so. Sony hasn't released any loss/gains on the per-unit for a ps3. So at this point it's no better than wildly guessing.
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Prove 100%? No.
But analysts have priced out the cost of components in the PS3. They came to the conclusion that the PS3 costs about $1000 a unit, based on what information Sony has been offering.
And by "analysts" I don't mean "random nerds on websites" I mean "financial analysts who do this for a living to try and offer valuable information to investors to determine the financial health of companies." It was on Slashdot a while back, I don't feel like dredging it up. A Google search will turn it up.
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> It was on Slashdot a while back
Yes, it really was a very long while back.
You obviously haven't noticed the several revisions it has went through since then.
It is significantly cheaper for them to build it now.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
The one thing I hate about console-proponents is that they exist. Each console has its pros and cons. Just because you bought a PS3 instead of an Xbox 360 or Wii does not make you better than someone else. AFAIK, nobody is paying you to advertise for Sony either.
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+1 Underrated / Insightful.
That really can't be put more fairly, and is true more so now than in the past. The Xbox360, PS3, and Wii all have their high points and low points. For the Xbox, it seems to be getting "all" the games (and woo i get to use it as a bridge from my PC to my TV without buying a TV tuner card that wouldn't fit on my already fully loaded motherboard), the Wii gets a lot of "just plain fun" games that are also great with groups of people, and the PS3 gets some pretty games and is the
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For the Xbox, it seems to be getting "all" the games (and woo i get to use it as a bridge from my PC to my TV without buying a TV tuner card that wouldn't fit on my already fully loaded motherboard)
I don't understand this. Xbox 360 acts as a Media Center Extender, or an output device. If you have an HDTV, or you have an SDTV and a $50 VGA-to-S-Video-and-composite scan converter, you can output PC signals to your TV. A TV tuner card, on the other hand, acts as a video input device. Besides, USB TV tuners don't take up more space on a motherboard.
And no, you don't get all the games even if you buy all three consoles. PC gets the games self-published by developers operating out of home offices, includ
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One thing I love about PS3 fanboys is that they try to defend the PS3 by picking holes in others' statements rather than giving examples of why PS3s are good machines.
Re:No (Score:5, Informative)
Remember, some of us actually have REASONS for picking a particular console!
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You know, when I bought my Wii, it was becuase it represented a new paradigm in gaming, and the games that were already available for it were incredibly fun and interesting.
When I bought my 360, I knew it would be the PS2 of this generation, filled with the interesting titles other consoles wouldn't bother publishing. I just finished Braid this weekend.
When I bought my PSP, I thought it was really cool I could hang out in front of a hotel and press a few buttons and have any one of a huge selection of plays
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Don't worry. There's a lot of PS3 haters out there, and they love to be heard. The folks that like the PS3 don't care enough to post how much they enjoy the system.
I have a PS3 and I like it a lot. I don't play too many games on it, but I do play some. I play a lot of media with it - it's my main media head to my collecton of music, movies, etc. The uPNP media support is superb.
I have played around with Linux on it a lot and it's great being able to do so. Boots a little slow, but it works pretty w
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First of all, ANY console in a closed cupboard will overheat, but leave a PS3 and XBOX360 in the middle of the floor, and there will be a CONSIDERABLE heat difference. You would think that moving the power adapter inside would make it warmer, which it probably does, but considering it's still cool to the touch after 4 straight days of gaming+folding@home is pretty remarkable.
As for failures, it's true, I was mainly comparing it to the 360, but every person I know (save 1) who ever bought a wii played with i
Re:No (Score:5, Interesting)
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Depends on the scaler (Score:4, Interesting)
You think that is great? Get a big screen TV and play Super Mario Bros. 3 on big world.
Oh God, the pixels, the pixels are coming to get me!!!!
It depends on which emulator you're using. If you're using the official Virtual Console emulator, it'll look blocky because vcNES uses nearest-neighbor resampling. But if you're using an emulator that supports Scale2x [sourceforge.net], hq2x [hiend3d.com], or some other smart resampling method for line art, you can get NES games to look better than TG16 in some cases and Super NES games to look nearly PS1-quality.
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The PS3 is a flop anyway.
I thought it was a MegaFLOP which led to it being occasionally used in scientific simulations.
But then I don't really follow the console gaming scene. Of course running Sinclair or C64 games on a PS3 has a little something to it...
RSX access was possible? Prove it. (Score:2)
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Not such that there was a firmware that allowed RSX, but an older firmware had a flaw which allowed you to break into RSX access.
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Yeah, on the ps3 you have a hard time playing games for other consoles on it, on the 360, you have a rough time playing it's own games...
Re:Wow, Guess That Makes The 360 A Massive Failure (Score:5, Funny)
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Its true that it doesn't have the market share of the Xbox, yet. However for most of last year it was happily outselling the MS offering here in the UK.
I love this "PS3 is a total flop" meme. It's really funny and so obviously fanboi driven.
The PS3 has sold around 60% (last I saw) of the number of units the Xbox has. It has some genuinely interesting recent developments (flower, Noby Noby boy, though I don't really get it) a decent catalog and much nicer hardware than the 360 (power, memory slots, standard
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It's 6.7m units less.
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It's less units sold. It's a greater rate of units sold. Do you know when the market's going to become saturated ? Do you ? Really ?
Why do they always forget Freespace? (Score:5, Informative)
I cry everytime people don't remember the hardworking folks over at the Freespace SCP when it comes to Linux gaming....
http://scp.indiegames.us/ [indiegames.us]
and
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php [hard-light.net]
for more info.
Over a million posts in their forum debugging an amazing game.
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From the main page: "The Source Code Project was started roughly five years ago, when Volition released the source code to the game known as 'Freespace 2'. This virtually unknown game consistently won awards for being a great action space sim, but never really caught on when it was released. The Source Code Project has worked, and conti
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Huh?
I have searched many times for open source games and linux games, and this Freespace doesn't seem to appear in the lists:
http://rangit.com/software/top-8-linux-games-of-2007/ [rangit.com]
http://www.linuxgames.com/ [linuxgames.com]
And many more sites like that...
Some people don't remember, but even more people might never have heard of it.
Linux on PS3? (Score:4, Insightful)
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a usb keyboard works fine on it. I think you need one for most installations. I am not disputing that a cheap PC is a much better alternative.
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Re:Linux on PS3? (Score:5, Informative)
Linux on PS3 clusters, used for scientific computing, is a huge success. Sony openly supported Linux from the start on their console with precisely this sort of work in mind.
Get off the couch and go do something productive.
Re:Linux on PS3? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're missing a very valuable piece of information here, which is that anyone that openly supports Linux on their platform deserves praise. Sure, it's annoying that they abstracted away the hardware, but STILL. They are trying to protect their IP (gawd, did I really just say that???), but instead of locking it down to the hilt, they provided abstraction and gave us Linux anyway. It's hard to complain about. Given time, that hardware abstraction will probably be bypassed for good - of course it will be after the PS3 is past it's prime, and despite the sales numbers, the hardware itself definitely has a few more good years under it.
No - I won't open fire on Sony on this one. I really wish they would license the ability to get direct hardware access for a reasonable price for homebrew, but I won't hold my breath.
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Sadly that's mainly because you can get half a dozen dual quad core Xeon nodes for the price of a rackmounted Cell computing node. A bit of greed and presumably an ability to get purchased on black ops military budgets has put the Cell out of reach of scientific computing for anyone with a budget accountants get to look at. The MASSIVE price jump between the 256MB playstation3 and a 2GB system that is otherwise similar is depressing -
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Could you tidy up the difference between smart and clever for me ?
PC's downfall (Score:2)
Even "cheap" PC GPU's can blow away the PS3 in terms of FLOPS
One thing the PS3 can do that cheap PC GPUs can't is output video to an SDTV without a $50 adapter.
and they cost a fraction of what a PS3 does.
I don't understand. Both a PC and a PS3 cost roughly $400. Besides, you usually need a separate PC, a separate monitor, and a separate copy of the game for each player, which doesn't always work that well when you have friends or relatives over.
Re:Linux on PS3? (Score:5, Insightful)
but why? why put yourself through the trouble of making it run, when you could run Linux on a computer way easier and keep playing games on the PS3?
This is the fucking problem with geeks today, and why the dot-com boom ruined the tech scene.
Why? Because you fucking CAN! There doesn't need to be a point. It's INTERESTING, and you can learn about a new system by doing it. Hell, maybe you'll even find a way to unlock the graphics hardware instead of waiting for someone else to do it so you can just download the patch and be all l33t.
Now we've got all these lazy pseudo-geeks running around like "Oh, Linux on the PS3 is stupid, why not just use a PC?" and "Oh, pattern-recognition technology in video cameras is stupid, why not just use a bar-code scanner?" etc. Not sure if it applies to parent poster here or not (either way, shame on you, parent) but this is a result of all the people who went to school for computer science because it was the "hot new thing" and you could "get rich and retire when you're 30!". Now we have clusters of lazy, jaded nerds who resist change and new technology because they had a hard time leaning what little they know in the first place.
</rant>
Re:Linux on PS3? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Linux on PS3? (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, I would so love a Beowulf-Cluster of Linux Grandma powered toasters. Grandma would get her exercise. I would be able to start my toaster from my cellphone. Everyone would get toast. There could be toast preference presets that auto adjust with biometrics, I could sell my toast data to Google Trends and eat it too. EVERYONE WINS WITH GRANDMA POWERED LINUX TOASTERS!
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Best AC post of the year !
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"Don't get all worked up over me buying it to play games on it."
Umm, he's not, did you even read his post?
He's getting upset at people criticising him for playing with linux on it. That's what. That all these people pretending to be geeks are now criticising folks for playing with new things on new systems.
You want it to play games, fine, but asking why he plays with other options for it, telling him (or me for that matter) that it's stupid and a waste off time is not acceptable, intelligent or inquisitive.
PS3 for scientific applications (Score:2)
I think you are confusing actual research with ...
Then sit back down and shut up while you think about it. While you're sitting there, ostensibly thinking, here is some material to consider:
Re:Linux on PS3? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have seen what you loathe happen over and over again before .com. Your conclusions are too hasty.
Certain percentage of geeks simply matures and "doing cool stuff" is not enough. Or maybe it is exposure to actual, non-academic, world of software development where cool ideas tend to work out as dumb waste of time.
If you have your pet project, it also has to be useful. It needs to be something worthy your time when not with family/working. It ideally should give you job-translatable skills (haha). And you definitely do not want to reinvent wheel or spend time making someone elses reinvented wheel working.
More on topic:
Installing Linux on PS3 is easy. Installing emulators on Linux is easy. Its nothing to write home if you do both. Hell, its wasted time if you do it because you could be actually look for those hidden hardware gems instead making videos of you playing Mario.
Re:Linux on PS3? (Score:4, Insightful)
Certain percentage of geeks simply matures and "doing cool stuff" is not enough. Or maybe it is exposure to actual, non-academic, world of software development where cool ideas tend to work out as dumb waste of time.
This argument doesn't hold water.
Yes, geeks mature, get families and jobs that take up a lot of time so they lose interest in doing geeky stuff "just because".
But real geeks never lose the understanding that cool hacks are their own reward, and never start asking "why would you bother", because they remember when they would have bothered, and are perfectly capable of being impressed by the cool and the useless, even if they don't have time for it.
No the "Why bother?" arguments come from the posers, who never did see the value in doing something just because it was there to be done.
Re:Linux on PS3? (Score:5, Insightful)
Um...
Why are you blaming this on the dot-com bust exactly? I can and should be as jaded as anyone else. I worked for a dot-bomb, and I've even since started, run, and failed at my own business.
I don't think this has anything to do with dot-com, and everything to do with a trend that's been going on for a LONG time now: each generation is lazier than the last. The last generation had mortgages and homes, this generation didn't know the work involved and presumed buying a home was and should be easy, greedy people accomodated, and here we are: trashed economy (I'm over-simplifying of course). There are kids straight out of college (I'm only 10 years out myself!) that my wife administers at work, and their expectations of what they should have and be able to do while on business time is ridiculous. They're LAZY. I was and still am lazy to a degree, but it's as though they saw my lazy and took it to a whole new level.
I'm not saying every single person coming out of college right now and for the last 3 years is a useless pile, but it's a trend that is going to continue - the next generation is going to see how lazy THIS one is and take THAT to a whole new level. The economy getting trashed like it is might be the best thing for us. Once upon a time, people were encouraged to grow gardens in their yards for food, to go out of their way to work not just for themselves, but the betterment of everyone around them. I would hope it doesn't come to that again, to people living in Hoover^H^H^H^H^H^HBushvilles, etc, but dang it - we all need to become less lazy.
How does that translate? Well - "Linux on the PS3 is stupid, why not just use a PC?" really translates to "That's too much work, I can just use a PC instead." LAZY.
Being a really good geek - I don't care what area of technology or science you work in - requires a desire to learn. You soak up new information like a sponge, and you're always looking for new information. The desire to hack something at it's core comes from that desire for new information, along with a healthy dose of ADD usually. ;) OOOH! New! Shiny!
But hey, I'm talking like the old man here, and I'm 31. I've been in my career for almost 13 years now - did some of my time while still in college. If I'm talking this way about 21, 22, and 23 year olds now...woooh boy. My own niece and nephews, the oldest is soon to turn 12 - they're laziness just oozes from their pores. I'm sure I didn't appear much better to my parents, but the way they demand that everything be given to them without any work being required - it's not a value my family has bestowed upon them that I can tell. It's a societal trait.
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You are being a tad cynical, but I do generally agree with you.
I've often thought about this issue. Each generation has generally been more prosperous than the last. This prosperity leads to levels of expectations that exceed the previous generation. We are, in a way, a victim of our own successes. Or, in other words, we're being spoilt.
Each generation of children have been given more, without much effort at all. It's only human nature that they learn to expect to be given what they want. This is just
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It's because all the linux geeks waste their time on stupid shit instead of actual useful things.
from the like-your-very-own-time-machine dept. (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of those programs worked on the PS3 day one. I am not aware of what makes this a new development.
What explosion? (Score:5, Insightful)
Please name an emulator which works on the PS3 today and didn't in 2007.
"Explosion" implies that there are many such emulators, and that they all showed up recently. In fact, I don't know of any at all, and it's hardly an "explosion" for a Linux system to have access to a bunch of common Linux packages. What next? "Emulator explosion on the Eee" headlines because my specific Eee has access to more emulators than it did when I bought it?
The madness (Score:3, Funny)
The reason is the same as it has always been (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason to put Linux on a PS3 is the same as it has been since release day: access to the wonderfully (sinfully?) complex Cell.
If the thought of 6 128-bit wide vector processors hanging off the back of a general purpose CPU gets you all hot and bothered, the Linux on the PS3 is a great place to start.
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The parent here makes it sound like you should be able to just write a few lines of code and set a compile flag to have your program start using the SPEs on the Cell. That's completely untrue - you'd need to write some very specific, very custom code to use them, as they're basically just very fancy DSPs with regards to C coding.
As a point of reference, no one's ported x264 to use the Cell for encoding, and that's the sort of application that the Cell is supposed to be very good with. IIRC, part of the issu
Don't get too excited (Score:4, Interesting)
It strikes me that people who try to hype up the PS3's emulation under linux have never tried it.
I have, ignoring the large amount of tweaking to get a distro working properly with the PS3 hardware/HDTV (I've tried yellow dog and ubuntu), the emulation just isn't very good.
At least with an NES emulator you'll be able to run a game at full speed. However, good luck getting it fit to the screen properly or get it working with PS3 gamepad (again more tweaking). Other systems, SNES, GENESIS, don't have an emulator that is going to run at full speed on the PS3.
Other software suffers from the same problems, lack of selection and slow performance. Maybe this will change in the future, but right now linux on the cell isn't that great for desktop style apps. Yet I see it hyped up all the time, but people who either haven't bothered to try it, or are fine with a lot of tweaking for a extremely sluggish emulation/desktop experience. Just because you can do it, doesn't always mean that it is worth doing.
Re:pist frost? rly? (Score:5, Informative)
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Just because it's called Yellow Dog Linux v6, does NOT mean it's based on Fedora 6. Rather, it's based on the latest RedHat and CentOS code, and is much more similar to an upcoming version 6 of these products.
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$ xinput list
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It's sad really that those joypads have been out for so long and don't work out of the box, when the PS2 and PS3 ones do.
The problem is that Xorg added automatic configuration while not implementing any proper way to override it from the Xorg side. So its not the joypads drivers faults, its Xorg that is the guilty one, it will happily grab all the devices it can find and turn them into a mouse (aka making them unusable), a little HAL config file [github.com] however can easily fix that permanently.
This is either due to a lack of Linux input standards,
/dev/input/eventX works perfectly fine, the trouble is that dpad comes in a numerous different variants of events, some gamepad have it as firs
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Who modded this insightful? I run emulators on my PC (actually my Mac) mostly of games I own or never were released in the U.S. (I'm looking at you Mother 3).
Mac emulators are far behind their Windows and even Linux counterparts. While I hope the situation will get better as Macs gain more market share, for a lot of emulation tasks, Mac OS doesn't cut it (Boot Camp is great, of course, but no one wants to boot into Windows just to play Rhythm Tengoku).
However, even on a Windows PC, it's not nearly as grea
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What is the point of purchasing the most expensive consoles on the market to play emulator games? This is not news. Linux on the PS3 is news. Seti at home on the PS3 is news. Running an emulator, solitaire or Tux racer on the PS3 is a waste good hardware (unless this is your primary Linux rig).
What is the point of purchasing the most expensive consoles on the market to play emulator games? So I can play them on my 52" HDTV. With an actual game pad. From the same rig that plays the latest releases. And my BluRay movies. In my living room, sprawled out on my comfortable couch with a metric assload of snack food instead of at my desk in my office chair where I can spill beer in my server.
You must be a hit at parties.
Re:Sweet! (Score:4, Informative)
I'd recommend not to. It's dog slow because you can only use 256 MB RAM, you don't have video acceleration, last time I checked I didn't have bluetooth (which means no wireless keyboard and mouse and no sixaxis), and Sony regularly (mostly unintentionally) breaks the system with firmware updates (at least up to the point you need to spend time to get it booting again). Unless you really want to program the Cell CPU Linux on the PS3 is pretty much worthless. Aside from some simple emulators for ancient systems you can forget doing anything useful on it.
The PS3 programming scene is also about as dead as it can be. I've been lurking on ps2dev for years and it's still the same 5 people and nothing has really been achieved yet...
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Re:Sweet! (Score:4, Informative)
not too much
indeed you are right about bluetooth, but using the video mem is not of much help with the ram shortage
why?
because its video mem
you can copy very fast into it, so swapping out to it works well
-but- reading from it is painfully slow, and all in all using hdd's for swap is more convenient
i wish we would get some more acceleration than using the cpu dma for pushing data around - that would make ps3 linux quite usable
but in its current state it is really only for those usable, like me, who wish to train cell programming (which is not that difficult as some like to explain in the media)
Re:Sweet! (Score:4, Interesting)
There are several projects, like spu-medialib [sourceforge.net] and mesa3d [sourceforge.net], which accelerate PS3 graphics/video on the Cell's SPEs. spu-medialib is actually a general framework for acceleration, while mesa3d offloads OpenGL onto the SPEs as a GPU. Why don't you put some of those people you say you're training to program the Cell onto those projects and give something back to the community that's given you the programmable platform?
Re:Sweet! (Score:4, Informative)
Actually I know the guy who's working on spu-medialib, he's unsolo from ps2dev.org. I've actually been exchanging some thoughts with him back when I was playing around trying to do video decoding on the PS3. Anyway, spu-medialib is far from complete and doesn't nearly make up for the lack of GPU acceleration, there hasn't been any major improvements since back when I was playing around with PS3 linux. You can still forget even getting 720p playback on PS3 linux. Don't know about the state Mesa/Gallium/anything else to do 3D on the Cell, but judging from the activity on PS3 dev forums there's nothing interesting for end-users there either.
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I get 1080p HD playback (and all the lower frame/bitrates, too) just fine using unsolo's spu-medialib mplayer -vo driver on my PS3, as I have for about a year now.
The mesa3d project is highly active, including this month, on their dev email list.
There seems to be quite a lot of interest in PS3 programming to both developers and to end users - like playing video (directly to an HDMI TV) on a $400 PS3 that would crush a PC costing 2-5x as much, that includes all that other stuff like Blu-Ray, Bluetooth, and l
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You sound a lot like that unsolo dude himself you know? Like a Sony/IBM advertisement.
Anyway, I'm not calling you a liar, maybe you do have some video's that somewhat work in 1080p, maybe you don't, I don't know but I highly doubt that you actually have a setup that reliably plays random 1080p videos. The reason is that no-one I know of can confirm an OSS player exists that can do that, and there's loads of people confirming even 720p MPEG with mplayer -vo ps3 is choppy and h264 is a slideshow. In other wor
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I said 'last time I checked' the bluetooth did not work, after which I haven't bothered to check on it again because it was already obvious it sucks for anything but Cell development.
And using the ps3vram driver you do _not_ have full access to the 256 MB video RAM, you can use it, but the bandwidth is terrible because it actually uses the GPU to DMA memory back and forth to a window in (directly accessible) XDR memory, because the bandwidth of the 2nd half of memory to the CPU is about 8MB/s (or something
Re:Sweet! (Score:5, Interesting)
Listen, I've tried PS3 linux before, I know what the hardware is, and I know what the limitations of PS3 linux are. These have not changed (apart from the bluetooth thing), and these are not bound to change. ie: the 2nd half of memory will always be basically useless, and the RSX will never be fully accessible from PS3 linux.
So effectively, there is no hope PS3 linux will get more useful than it already is, which is how it was when I checked it out. I've been running it for a few months which was about a year ago, and back then it broke 3 times on firmware updates. How you would know better how much time I spent with it eludes me...
If you don't believe what I'm saying about PS3 linux: go ahead and try it anyway, I couldn't care less, not my PS3, not my spare time. Just find out yourself how terrific it works and how much I'm trolling here. Don't see why I would be trolling about PS3 linux on Slashdot anyway but hey, some people here obviously feel better screaming troll all the time.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
One of my pals here in SoCal is getting closer and closer to destroying the hypervisor restrictions. He's managed to get a few commands directly to GPU and memory, and once he figures out how to get all commands to it (although from what I'm told there is a performance hit of about 40%, for reasons I'm not technically competent enough to understand,) then it's going to be a much more fun system to play with. Hell, if I could run games and whatnot through the PS3 with Linux I'd unhook my PC from the TV and j
Re:Sweet! (Score:4, Informative)
Bzzt.. Wrong...
YellowDog 6.1 allows access to the GPU memory too...
It's the only distro that ships with the kernel patches that allow it to do so, but there is nothing stopping any distro picking up the kernel patch.
http://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/9858/
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, GT5 is more impressive, but racing split-screen isn't nearly as easy or fun as playing a highly multi-player oriented game like M.U.L.E.
Re:Sweet! (Score:5, Insightful)
"Only" 256MB RAM? Accurate or not, what do you think we're emulating here? The SNES had a total of 256 kilobytes of RAM, with cartridge ROMs topping at 6MB. Quake 2 ran on a Pentium/90 with 16MB.
The PS3's specs might be a problem for a Windows box that demands half a gig for OS overhead, but Linux isn't supposed to have those problems.
Re:Can someone answer a few questions for me? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are several projects, like spu-medialib [sourceforge.net] and mesa3d [sourceforge.net], which accelerate PS3 graphics/video on the Cell's SPEs. spu-medialib is actually a general framework for acceleration, while mesa3d offloads OpenGL onto the SPEs as a GPU.
There's a narrative tutorial [linux.yes.nu] for installing the spu-medialib mplayer driver, with links to files, that plays video on the SPEs quite well, including 1080p HD videos.
The USB works fine, so an external HD should work fine. I don't know whether there are PPC (the Cell's application core) drivers for a USB tuner card, but you should try it. If it doesn't work, make it work with some programming. That's what Linux is all about :).
Re:Yay. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony locked it down with a firmware update. My biggest complaint about Sony is they're not very friendly to homebrew game developers (not that any of the console makers are).
And seriously? "It'll look stupid compared to someone running MGS4?" Is that REALLY supposed to compare? You don't find it in the least bit awesome that you can get all your favorite old games (that you own already, obviously) on your HDTV with a wireless controller? Are you really saying that the PS3 would be better if it did less? What kind of geek are you?
Re: (Score:2)
You don't find it in the least bit awesome that you can get all your favorite old games (that you own already, obviously) on your HDTV with a wireless controller?
If you already have an HDTV, you can already do this with a PC and a Bluetooth game controller. If you already have the HDTV, what makes the PLAYSTATION 3 better than a PC running Windows or Ubuntu for running emulators?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Much more friendly than the accursed Microsoft though, still no progress (real) towards Linux on there, makes me wish I bought a PS3 :-/
Microsoft has the XNA API for homebrew games.... and they let you sell games on their network. I'd say that's pretty friendly.
Re: (Score:2)
It isn't necessary to get task A to work on product B just because we can.
You see that, that little statement right there, THAT is why you need to hand in your geek card. And I mean NOW!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Someone who's noticed that most games these days suck perhaps?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree.
We're in an age where some incredible games are being released. The indie scene is more alive than it's been since the days of Doom. When I bought my first indie game, Pontifex, back in 2000, it was a strange thing. Today, for the first time in history, you can actually buy an indie game right from your xbox. I bought Braid and N+ this weekend and it took about 20 seconds. The commercial scene has some incredible players, like Valve Software, who keep on churning out unique titles like Left 4 Dea
Re: (Score:2)
It's a damn fine Blu-Ray player and upscaling DVD player. Dunno why you'd want to run linux on it, though; If you're not going to play games on it, you'll get lots more bang for your buck buying standard PC hardware, especially pre-owned.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Buy the 80GB model, which does allow you to play PS2 games, natively as they added the hardware.