I'm drunk and I feel like making rediculous conjectures: PS2 emulation with the X360?

[Shogmaster]

Actually, I'm not that drunk, but I did find my old BLEEM! T shirt I bought at 2000 E3, and got a crazy 'what if' scenario going in my head.

So what do you think, peeps? Is it even possible? I think it might be. Consider:

1. They both use standard DVD-ROMs. X360's drive physically shouldn't have any problems reading PS2 DVDs and CDs.

2. Xenos' "enhenced" 10MB eDRAM could be made to emulate GS's "embedded" 4MB eDRAM. Not sure 32GB/s from GPU core to eDRAM on Xenos is enough to deal with "48.6GB/s bandwidth" that GS's embedded 4MB gives it though. I'm not smart enough to tell if that's comparing apples to oranges.

3. GS's pixel pipeline is simple enough to be emulated easily by the Xenos. Infact, I'm wondering the very nature of the unified shaders on the Xenos might not excel at something like this.

4. The triple core nature of the XeCPU could easily emulate EE's VPs. They are both In Order processors too. Core 0 could emulate the MIPS core, Core 1 could emulate VP0, Core 2 could emulate VP1, etc...

5. 480MB of work RAM should be enough to emulate 32MB of PS2.

6. HDD would be very useful, just as in emulating XBox 1 games with individual game profiles.

Any thoughts? Am I indeed too drunk?

 

[BlueTsunami]

A PS2 Emulator hasn't even been built for the PC yet (I believe) certain games work...but a majority of them either just boot up to the Logo and die. The Xbox360 should be powerful enough, thats not really the question though. Its more or less the emulator itself being done.

Also....the code would have to be ported over to the 360s architecture. So that would probably set back any dreams of getting PS2 Emulation on the 360. Maybe near the end of its life? (Generation Cycle)

 

[ihamoitc2005]

emulation?

I think a much more exciting and likely possibility is of the PS3 playing xbox games.

 

[Shogmaster]

A PS2 Emulator hasn't even been built for the PC yet (I believe) certain games work...but a majority of them either just boot up to the Logo and die. The Xbox360 should be powerful enough, thats not really the question though. Its more or less the emulator itself being done.

Also....the code would have to be ported over to the 360s architecture. So that would probably set back any dreams of getting PS2 Emulation on the 360. Maybe near the end of its life? (Generation Cycle)

Hey listen, I'm not even talking about the legal and financial feasablilty of making such an emulator. I'm just conjecturing about the technical feasability.

And I'm pretty drunk too.

I think a much more exciting and likely possibility is of the PS3 playing xbox games.

That too! It's just so funny how the OEM musical chairs turned out.

It's just that PS2 emulation is much more of a feat than XBox emulation since XBox 1 emulation is something that's seemingly easy to do on nVidia equipped PCs.

 

[BlueTsunami]

Hey listen, I'm not even talking about the legal and financial feasablilty of making such an emulator. I'm just conjecturing about the technical feasability.

And I'm pretty drunk too.

LOL...you must be drunk because i'm NOT talking about the Legal and Financial feasability of making such an emulator . I'm talking about the emulation community making an emulator for it and the fact that its still in the works for the PC.

 

[Shogmaster]

LOL...you must be drunk because i'm NOT talking about the Legal and Financial feasability of making such an emulator . I'm talking about the emulation community making an emulator for it and the fact that its still in the works for the PC.

Look man, it's taking all my cranial effort not to type like a raving loon right now so no making fun of the Shogster!

 

[westsand]

I'm so out of it studying for this test that I don't know who I am.

But it is wednesday night, right?

 

[Xenus]

It sounds like both of you need to hit the hay.

and yes it is wensday night or should I say thursday morning.

 

[Shogmaster]

It's only 11PM here, Ohio boy.

BTW, I use to live in Cincy.

 

[Xenus]

Ah that's about a 45 minutes from my hometown though at present it is an hour and a half now that I've moved into college at OSU. There are a whole hell of a lot of people from Cincy here. Speaking of which I should be going to bed as I have to be up in 6 hours but I am really not that tired. damn my owlish ways.

 

[Guden Oden]

It typically takes more than a factor ~10 in clock speed to emulate a different computing hardware architecture to 100% speed. Depending on accuracy needed, a factor 3-400 might be required... Also, PS2 contains a lot more bits and bobs than just GS, CPU, VUs. You have the DMAC, the video decoder, IOP, SPU DSPs (x2), likely other misc. bits and bobs as well. And you need that stuff to make PS2 games run, any game software can run arbitrary code on the IOP, so it needs to be there. It's a 33MHz chip, so it's not trivial to emulate even for a modern x86 CPU, and the EE itself is a 300MHz chip. Is there any emulator that does that fast realtime emulation on current hardware?

People describe this thing as a bitch to program as it is, imagine emulating it... No, I don't think it can be done full-speed on x360, especially considering the in-order nature of the xenon CPU. But it would certainly be a cool idea to try, and I'd be all for it. My PS2 is a noisy bastard, it'd be good to not have to use it. Assuming x360 actually is quieter that is.

 

[Shogmaster]

Ah that's about a 45 minutes from my hometown though at present it is an hour and a half now that I've moved into college at OSU. There are a whole hell of a lot of people from Cincy here. Speaking of which I should be going to bed as I have to be up in 6 hours but I am really not that tired. damn my owlish ways.

Well, I didn't live in downtown Cincy but for couple of years. The rest of my time in Ohio was in Fairfield, which is a good half an hour away from downtown.

It typically takes more than a factor ~10 in clock speed to emulate a different computing hardware architecture to 100% speed. Depending on accuracy needed, a factor 3-400 might be required... Also, PS2 contains a lot more bits and bobs than just GS, CPU, VUs. You have the DMAC, the video decoder, IOP, SPU DSPs (x2), likely other misc. bits and bobs as well. And you need that stuff to make PS2 games run, any game software can run arbitrary code on the IOP, so it needs to be there. It's a 33MHz chip, so it's not trivial to emulate even for a modern x86 CPU, and the EE itself is a 300MHz chip. Is there any emulator that does that fast realtime emulation on current hardware?

People describe this thing as a bitch to program as it is, imagine emulating it... No, I don't think it can be done full-speed on x360, especially considering the in-order nature of the xenon CPU. But it would certainly be a cool idea to try, and I'd be all for it. My PS2 is a noisy bastard, it'd be good to not have to use it. Assuming x360 actually is quieter that is.

I imagine, emulating PS2 would be a lot more a challenge than XBox, but if you go the route of the individual profile per game, it might be doable! Just look at a 200Mhz DC emulating 33Mhz PSOne games quite well through BLEEMCAST, which was by one on one basis.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

There's enough people worrying about how PS2 emulation is going to happen on PS3, let alone on XB360!!!

 

[London Geezer]

There's enough people worrying about how PS2 emulation is going to happen on PS3, let alone on XB360!!!

I'd love to see a third party giving the two fingers to both MS and Sony and develop an Xbox emulator for PS3 (which i think would be much easier than a Ps2 one for X360), and then a GC emulator for X360 - which i also think will be much easier than a PS2 emulator.
Can't believe it hasn't been mentioned yet how easier it might be for X360 to emulate GC instead of PS2.

None of the above will probably happen, but it would certainly be cool to see.

 

[Nite_Hawk]

Look man, it's taking all my cranial effort not to type like a raving loon right now so no making fun of the Shogster!

You aren't typing nearly poorly enough to be really drunk.

Nite_Hawk

 

[Shogmaster]

I'd love to see a third party giving the two fingers to both MS and Sony and develop an Xbox emulator for PS3 (which i think would be much easier than a Ps2 one for X360), and then a GC emulator for X360 - which i also think will be much easier than a PS2 emulator.
Can't believe it hasn't been mentioned yet how easier it might be for X360 to emulate GC instead of PS2.

None of the above will probably happen, but it would certainly be cool to see.

XBox 1 emulation just isn't as sexy to me because it's such a straight forward design on the PC side. One X86 proc and an nVidia GPU. You'd think someone would have made a good PC emulator by now....

You aren't typing nearly poorly enough to be really drunk.

Nite_Hawk

Well it took 10x as long to type up a post last night.

 

[Fafalada]

XBox 1 emulation just isn't as sexy to me because it's such a straight forward design on the PC side.

It would still be funny if a 3rd party emulator ended up being more compatible then the respective backward compatibility solution Regardless of a platform - although of course if it were on a competing platform it'd be all the funnier.

 

[dukmahsik]

if there was an emu avail i'd def get it!

 

[Reznor007]

XBox 1 emulation just isn't as sexy to me because it's such a straight forward design on the PC side. One X86 proc and an nVidia GPU. You'd think someone would have made a good PC emulator by now....

http://www.mameworld.net/vlinde/

Look for the Sept 9 and 11 entries. Not exactly Xbox calibur hardware, but it's a PC

Gamecube emulation on 360 or PS3 could be usable since PowerPC can self virtualize and run the code almost natively. You'd have to catch the Gekko extra instructions, and emulate the sound DSP and do a little graphics HLE, but it could work. There's already semi-working Gamecube emulators on PC, but they are extremely slow. Bust a Move 3K runs great(probably sits in idle loops alot), but Ikaruga is less than 10FPS on my XP 3200+(and that's with the graphics running on the GPU using pixel shader 2).

 

[ector]

Yep, porting Dolphin to the 360 would be fun, maybe I'll do that if a chip comes out

(i'm one of the two authors)

Oh, and dolphin basically only uses the gpu for rasterization, all T&L and similar are currently done on the CPU for compatibility. I only wrote a tev combiner->pixel shader recompiler, started on a recompiler to convert as much as possible of the transform pipeline to vertex shaders but never finished. This is one of the reason it is so slow.. another reason is the endian-ness problem which is especially annoying on the gc since display lists are built of lots of unaligned packed data... Yet another reason is that our PPC->x86 recompiler never was very good

All of these would be non-issues on the 360. One core for virtualizing the gekko, one for parsing gfx commands and feeding the xenos gpu, and the third one for the rest

[edit] damn this post became smiley heavy ;P