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SternburgExport ,

sony made a console so hard to develop for they can’t even figure it out themselves

randomaside ,
@randomaside@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

This is the actual truth. Revisiting the catalog of early cross platform games and it’s evident that Sony engineers couldn’t get anything running well on there for the first three years of its lifespan. The same games ran just fine on the Xbox360.

bruhduh ,
@bruhduh@lemmy.world avatar

KISS be like: am i a joke to you?

magic_lobster_party ,

It is hard. PS3 has incredibly specialized hardware. Even game developers had trouble making games for it at the time because it’s so arcane.

bolexforsoup ,

Yes it is hard, and that was their damn fault. I can’t believe they expected developers to have to program which processors take which loads with such granularity. Unbelievably stupid.

someguy3 ,

Was the idea to improve performance?

AProfessional ,

Yes, when used properly it did out perform the competition.

bolexforsoup ,

Yes but the modest improvement in output over the 360 was clearly not worth it

AndrasKrigare ,

It is, and it does provide improved performance at the expense of complexity. Both India and the US Air Force actually used clusters of PS3s to create supercomputers.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor) has some more details as well

cm0002 ,

Nah, that’s still a bunch of bull, they designed it and have all the documentation. They know all of its functionality, hidden or otherwise, it’s “undocumented” functions, it’s quirk’s, the very ins and outs of it. They probably still have original designers on staff. They have far more knowledge and experience of their own design than any game developers.

And yet RPCS3, an open source PS3 emulator based on reverse engineered research is able to achieve decent playability on most games.

Not to mention, they’re a multi-billion dollar company, don’t make excuses for them.

dgbbad ,

Most of the games I’ve played on RPCS3 look way better and run much smoother than how they did on the console itself. And no long wait times to load into the console OS save menuz saving was nearly instant. So good.

CaptainBlagbird ,
@CaptainBlagbird@lemmy.world avatar

They probably have a bunch of developers like me: Dafuq did I do yesterday? 😵‍💫

bruhduh ,
@bruhduh@lemmy.world avatar

Recent crowdstrike problem be like

mukt ,
@mukt@lemmy.ml avatar

Not to mention, they’re a multi-billion dollar company, don’t make excuses for them.

They pay someone handsomely to make excuses for them.

UltraGiGaGigantic ,

For profit corporations should not be trusted to preserve out culture. They would happily delete everything it if made then 1 dollar

Gork ,

I’ve worked at companies where the documentation was either non-existent, not digitized, or very poor in quality. Add 10+ years to that when nobody is left at the company who worked on the original project and it can cause this exact level of frustration.

magic_lobster_party ,

AFAIK, the documentation isn’t the main problem. I’m pretty sure PS3 is quite well understood.

The problem is how to translate the code to a typical X86 architecture. PS3’s uses a very different architecture with a big focus on their own special way on doing parallelism. It’s not an easy translation, and it must be done at great speed.

The work on RPCS3 incredible, but it took them more than a decade of optimizations to get where they are now. Wii U emulation got figured out relatively quickly in comparison, even if it uses similar specs to PS3.

jaaake ,

Having worked (as a designer, not an engineer) on a PS3 launch tile, this post also aligns with my understanding.

SkunkWorkz ,

The Wii U was just a souped up Wii so of course the emulation scene had a Wii U emulator in no time.

Buddahriffic ,

There can be a lot of subtle changes going from one uarch to another.

Eg, C/C++ for x64 and ARM both use a coprocessor register to store the pointer to thread-local storage. On x64, you can offset that address and read it from memory as an atomic operation. On ARM, you need to first load it into a core register, then you can read the address with offset from memory. This makes accessing thread-local memory on ARM more complicated to do in a thread safe manner than on x64 because you need to be sure you don’t get pre-empted between those two instructions or one thread can end up with another’s thread-local memory pointer. Some details might be off, it’s been a while since I dealt with this issue. I think there was another thing that had to line up perfectly for the bug to happen (like have it happen during a user-mode context switch).

And that’s an example for two more similar uarchs. I’m not familiar with cell but I understand it to be a lot more different than x64 vs ARM. Sure, they’ve got all the documentation and probably still even have the collective expertise such that everything is known by at least someone without needing to look it up, but those individuals might not have that same understanding on the x64 side of things to see the pitfalls before running into them.

And even once they experience various bugs, they still need to be debugged to figure out what’s going on, and there’s potential that the solution isn’t even possible in the paradigm used to design whatever go-between system they were currently working on.

They are both Turing complete, so there is a 1:1 functional equivalence between them (ie, anything one can do, the other can). But it doesn’t mean both will be able to do it as fast as the other. An obvious example of this is desktops with 2024 hardware and desktops with 1990 hardware also have that 1:1 functional equivalence, but the more recent machines run circles around the older ones.

Cyth ,

I don’t think it being hard is really the issue. Sony is a billion dollar multi-national corporation and they don’t get any benefit of the doubt whatsoever. Is it hard? Maybe it is, but maybe they should have thought of what they were going to do in the future when they were designing this. As was pointed out elsewhere, volunteers making an open source emulator are managing it so Sony not wanting to, or being unable to, isn’t an excuse.

deltapi ,

Xbox One plays a number of 360 games fine.

Apple used QuickTransit for their PPC apps on Intel migration to great success.

I guess Sony just didn’t want to pay the emulator tax?

drcobaltjedi ,

The xbox one/series consoles run a good number of 360 games dispite the fact that the 360 uses powerPC and the newer consoles are x86.

Sony is out here getting shown up by rpcs3 having about 70℅ of their listed games working perfectly fine by hobbyists reverse engineering the ps3.

scrubbles , (edited )
@scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech avatar

It’s because they completely rebuilt and recompiled them for x86

bruhduh ,
@bruhduh@lemmy.world avatar

Xbox 360 emulated xbox original games too, while Xbox 360 powerpc and Xbox original was x86

boonhet ,

Apple did the same again with their ARM migration and in my experience it worked great. I believe Microsoft also has a solution for running x86 software on ARM.

SkunkWorkz ,

But Apple’s solution isn’t pure software emulation, the SoC has special hardware inside to make it translate a lot faster.

XeroxCool ,

There’s some weird online connection issues on 360 that occur with certain modern routers. You get dropped randomly from the game. Annoyingly, the emulated 360 on One doesn’t skirt around the issue. It was annoying for Borderlands but made Left 4 Dead worthless on anything besides easy

DmMacniel ,
@DmMacniel@feddit.org avatar

The PS3 is the epitome of “idiots admire complexity” it was needlessly complicated with its cell architecture.

Quill7513 ,

There are design decisions that I really don’t understand why Sony made them. They do, however, make the PS3 the ideal piece of hardware if you’re wanting to build an adhoc super computer

slacktoid ,
@slacktoid@lemmy.ml avatar

I would argue its what you get when you build hardware without any consideration for the people writing the software. Which is just as much as an epitome if a kind of silly.

CodexArcanum ,

I always wondered about the legacy of the Cell architecture, which seems to have gone nowhere. I’ve never seen a developer praise it, and you can find devs who love just about every silly weird computer thing. Like, surely someone out there (emu devs?) have respect for what Cell was doing, right?

I’ve never understood it. Multicore processors already existed (the X360 had a triple-core processor, oddly) so I’m not clear what going back to multiple CPUs accomplished. Cell cores could act as FPUs also, right? PS3 didn’t have dedicated GPU, right?

Such a strange little system, I’m still amazed it ever existed. Especially the OG ones that had PS2 chips in them for backwards compatability! Ah, I miss my old PS3.

Redcuban1959 ,

I remember how some PS3 models have like the entire PS2 hardware inside them and it could run both ps1 and ps2 games.

Zipitydew ,

That model in the picture is one of them. I don’t think all the fat PS3s could. But nearly all of them. Was why they were chonky.

lichtmetzger ,

Some of them did it partly in software, though - and they were less compatible. The European FAT models all worked like that.

Sadly, the fully-backwards compatible models are all ticking timebombs, unless you get the RSX chip replaced with a later model. It’s a problem with the underfill on the chip which resulted in the YLOD, which is basically Sony’s variant of the red ring of death.

I have an early FAT model and it still runs stable, but I’m afraid to use it because I know it will fail eventually if I do. It does look sexy asf though!

Zipitydew ,

Thanks for the heads up. Recently took mine out of storage. Setting up a game room now that my kids are old enough to trust them. Did an SSD upgrade the other day. Will look into the chip issue.

Quill7513 ,

Emulating a processor with a unique set of properties, including infinite scalability, is hard. You can’t just put an emulation layer on top of x86 like you can with a processor that’s a subset of x86 instructions

Dudewitbow ,

you can to some extent, its not like you couldnt throw an emulator designed for one architecture to one with a subset, as its already shown on the PS4 for example that you could throw dolphin and cemu on a ps4 running linux. (not that it would run nice, but its possible).

its only harder if youre trying to do it in the base OS necause the base OS is usually lacking a graphics API rather than it be a hardware issue itself that presents problems. Its why jokingly people are saying the Xbox Series may be able to run PS3 soon beccause dev mode was updated with Mesa, which includes support from both opengl and vulkan. And alien hardware isnt usually always the issue, given random devices are capable of pf running Sega Saturn, which on its own lile the PS3, had extremely unique hardware

aaaaaaadjsf ,
@aaaaaaadjsf@hexbear.net avatar

Imagine if Sony executives got their way and the PS3 had two cell processors and no conventional GPU. It would have been even more of a nightmare to work on.

space_comrade ,

Would that have even worked? I can’t imagine you’d be able to get anything better than PS2 graphics with just an extra CPU.

aaaaaaadjsf ,
@aaaaaaadjsf@hexbear.net avatar

The SPEs on the cell processor are actually pretty good at rendering graphics. In a lot of late gen exclusive PS3 games you can see that the developers utilised them more and more for graphics rendering. So the plan was to have the SPEs on both cell processors do all the graphics.

sirico ,
@sirico@feddit.uk avatar

My 60 gb RIP after an ex left it on all night with sonic collections paused.

Cadeillac ,
@Cadeillac@lemmy.world avatar

Sounds like it was heading out regardless, unless there was a massive memory leak or something. Been leaving consoles on for days since the SNES. Not that I recommend it, but it really should not be a problem

pulverizedcoccyx ,

I wouldn’t recommend that for call of duty war zone on PS4. A perfectly clean, barely used and quite new PS4 pro - fans screaming at the top of their lungs and I’m just sitting at the main menu. I eventually shut it off because it sounded so crazy. Never experienced that with any game before or since.

SpookyGenderCommunist , (edited )
@SpookyGenderCommunist@hexbear.net avatar

I saved up and bought a reasonably beefy Mini PC, and turned it into an emulation console with Batocera. PS3 emulation runs like an absolute dream. But who needs backwards compatibility, when we can resell you the same game from 15 years ago, again, at full price???

altima_neo ,
@altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

Same, Ryzen 5700U. Handles it just fine.

roux ,
@roux@hexbear.net avatar

when we can resell you the same game from 15 years ago, again, at full price???

Well, there it is.

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