You guys ever thought of porting Dolphin to ps3?

[sini123]

It would be hysterical playing 1080p wii games on ps3 cfws

[Starscream]

Anything you can think of has already been discussed too many times.

[inteGReddy]

a ps3? why would i own a ps3 when i have this thing to play games on?

[Xtreme2damax]

Yeah at what 5 - 10 FPS at best? As mentioned this has already been discussed several times before, so learn2search. The Dolphin team is not working on a port, but someone else is attempting an unofficial port, although don't expect decent performance or compatibility. The limitations of the PS3 would make it very difficult to run a resource intensive emulator such as Dolphin, it may run, but it won't run well. That aside Dolphin is coded for x86 and x86-64 cpu architecture, not PPC64 which the PS3 uses, it would require some/most of the code for Dolphin to be rewritten for the PS3 hardware.

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

But considering that the Wii and PS3 both use PowerPC, I would imagine a good chunk of that code wouldn't even be needed in the first place.

Also, at least on the CPU side, the PS3 would have more than enough grunt when factoring the shared CPU architecture - no idea about RAM and GPU though.

[Xtreme2damax]

Wii PPC and PS3 Cell PPC are slightly different, and emulation is still required regardless. It's just like the Xbox can't directly access PC hardware without emulation, despite similarities in hardware. I would say that Dolphin on a PS3 may run at 45% - 50% at best and that is being generous. The PS3 is limited on ram compared to the PC, and Dolphin requires a substantial amount of ram depending on the game being emulated.

N00bs are wetting their panties thinking that emulating Wii/GC on the PS3 will allow them to play all games 100% speed @ 1080p resolution with full audio and it just isn't going to happen, it doesn't work that way.

[NaturalViolence]

I actually think it would probably be easier to do on a ps3. Obviously it would have to be done by a different team though. The PPE in the cell BE is extremely similar to the one in the GC/Wii. EFB to texture would not be needed since the PS3 has a low latency high bandwidth connection to xdram using an integrated memory controller on the cell be that's already used for constant fb read/writes by many ps3 exclusive games. And it's gpu has 60MB of edram (might be sram, either way it's damn fast), which would be perfectly suited for this. Audio and graphics would be tricky though, especially audio. Not sure if the SPEs would be able to help with LLE of audio at all, not sure what type of math is being used.

[neobrain]

tl;dr:
If we had a completely separate team of several full-time developers working on this and doing a proper port of Dolphin to the PS3, we would have a somewhat fast wii emulator on that platform.

...

But we don't even have full time devs for Dolphin itself. We don't even have SEVERAL of them, just a few :/

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

(01-30-2011, 07:49 AM)Xtreme2damax Wrote: Wii PPC and PS3 Cell PPC are slightly different, and emulation is still required regardless. It's just like the Xbox can't directly access PC hardware without emulation, despite similarities in hardware.

You DO realize Xbox "emulators" Cxbx and Dxbx run the Xbox CPU code directly, right?

[Xtreme2damax]

Well I'm not all that familiar with Xbox emulators, but I do know emulation is still involved. From what I understand there is hackery involved and the Xbe is converted to pc executable code, or something like that. It still requires everything to be run through an emulation layer, let's not forget how poor Xbox emulation is, both performance and compatibility.

There will still need to be a JIT for instructions that can't be executed directly on a cell PPC. Let's not forget that CPU isn't the only thing that has to be emulated, the graphics and dsp also need to be emulated as well, and graphics processing is heavy. The PS3 is limited with not only ram, but it's GPU is just a slightly modified Nvidia Geforce 7800GTX which is hardware over a few generations old.