While it's still early goings in the development scene of bringing commercial PS3 games to the point of playability on a PC, one PS3 emulator is now capable of getting to the title screen of some games, while fully running others.
In a post over on Reddit, the video above managed to make the rounds and entice some excitement by getting the PlayStation 3's Arkedo Series - 02 SWAP! from Arkedo Studio to boot to the title screen and into the game. Other playable titles include Disgaea and some homebrew projects. It's an impressive display of brute force in low level emulation.
This follows closely on the heels of the recent advancements in the PC gaming community from the Xenia project, where they're making big strides with getting Xbox 360 games to run via emulation.
There was a lot of talk about PS3 and Xbox 360 emulation not being viable for any shorter than a decade. Glorious PC Master Programmers for the win, eh?
Previously, the video below showcased early progress with the RPCS3 emulator, but the video above shows just how far they've come along with just a few tweaks.
One of the developers on the RPCS3 team, Alex Altea, dropped this useful comment on a Reddit thread, as well as a link to the source code for anyone with keen enough machine coding skills to help out...
"...there is still a long road to go until more complex games can be considered playable (regardless of the speed). Notice that this is running in a slow interpreter that is not optimized at all. RPCS3's author, [DH] is working on a PPU recompiler, though. That should give us another important speed-boost in the near future which will be appreciated by more "complex" games. :D"
A lot of gamers originally thought that the complexity of the PlayStation 3's Cell architecture would have prevented it from being emulated; however, the emulation community has proven that the barriers put into public discussion threads are nothing more than thin text and unfounded fanboy fears. The reality is that the PlayStation 3 emulation is almost coming along faster than the Xbox 360 emulation progress.
Now this doesn't mean that the PC emulation community is shaking hands with the devil of piracy like Romeo Dallarie during the UN debacle. What this means is that competition is about to pick up, and Sony is encouraged now more than ever to properly deliver backwards compatibility, or else gamers will simply need to stick with their glorious PC to maintain both the indie, mid-level and backwards compatible support with the PS3.
Thankfully, Sony does have an option in the form of PlayStation Now, the digital streaming service that enables players to play certain titles from the back catalog of the PlayStation 3's library.
Still, I would say that Sony is definitely in a better position than Microsoft, who still has no backwards compatibility in sight and none announced for the near future, either. In fact, they made it known that there wasn't even going to be any kind of digital game support from the 360's library made available for the Xbox One. For shame, Microsoft... for shame.
On the upside, the Wii U is still the only eighth gen console sitting pretty with all forms of backwards compatibility for not only its previous generation console, the Wii, but also past generations as well, including but not limited to NES games, SNES titles, N64 heavy hitters and even smash hits from the GameCube era. While the Xbox One tries hard to get the "Banana Surprise" out there, it's still the Wii U with the secret sauce and old-school backwards compatibility that comes out strong.
Once again, the Big 'N' comes out on top even when faced down against the competitive software community headed up by emulator aficionados. Whether or not Sony and Microsoft can weather the coming storm – with the surge in Xbox 360 and PS3 emulators making waves – remains to be seen.
You can learn more about the RPCS3 emulator, how it's coming along and other useful info by visiting the official website.
