Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Before I continue, I'm not asking for a port of dolphin on ps3. Seems a lot of people ask on fourms and its gets shut down. I want to ask more about the technical limitations of trying to port dolphin to the ps3.


I understand that you need hardware significantly more powerful than the console you're trying to emulate.

I do have a couple of questions though. What is the biggest limitation of porting dolphin to the ps3? I know that the Wii uses an over clocked 3rd generation PowerPC CPU (same as the GameCube and iBook g3) and the ps3 uses the Cell architecture which is another PowerPC variant. The ps3 also has more vram and overall better graphics processing power than the Wii. Wouldn't it be possible to run Wii games with native instructions to the PowerPC architecture and just translate kernel calls similar to how wine can run windows applications on Linux? How does this exactly work? I do also understand that the cell architecture was notoriously hard to code for, so could that be another reason? Is it possible someone could explain this in depth for me?


Thank you in advance!

Im not a dev, but its probably the reason why only recently (last 5 years) computers can GENUINELY AND SMOOTHLY run these emulators as emulating it is not 1 to 1 with playing it, its way more intense. For example a computer manufactured in 2017 lets say with a gtx 1050 i5 8400 could probably run MOST gamecube and ps2 games at base if not worse quality given the current state of these emulators. Now go look at the mhz difference between an 8400 and the wii's. 500mhz compared to 3ghz. Thats why, even though comparitively the PS3 is stronger, its nowhere near strong enough. (this is for emulators that are to the public, not how lets say some ps3s can "emulate" ps2 games with backwards compatibility. )

Even assuming that the CPU can be translated fine in realtime, there are other problems. Mainly the GPU, you would have to convert any GPU commands to something the RSX can understand and execute it in realtime. That will be both really extremely hard to do accurately and fast and would also require a lot of work that can't be copied from dolphin.

When this has been brought up historically, it's been pointed out that the PowerPC variants on the Wii and PS3 are sufficiently different that you couldn't get away with running things natively, and you'd have to rely on emulation. The PS3's CPU is faster than the Wii's, but not the ten times plus that would be required, especially when you take into account the fact that the emulation would need to happen on a single core, and a huge part of why the PS3 was faster was that it had multiple cores.

This on its own means there's no point bothering as it'd never be close to fast enough, and the ludicrous amount of work involved means that no one's going to have the appetite to try it in spite of that.