More glorious news for emulation today with the latest RPCS3 [Official Site] (a PlayStation 3 emulator) giving an update on their progress and it's damn fine too.
Firstly, they've announced that they've now hit over one thousand playable titles which is a pretty fun milestone for the project. When you look back to January this year, they only had around 700 titles playable so their progress there really is good.
They've managed to bring in a very important update to their "SPU LLVM recompiler" as well, although I will spare you the full technical details for our post the overall outcome is that many physics, sound and graphics glitches have been fixed with this.
They also showed off some of the improvements that have been done in this video:
Direct Link
Obviously performance still has some ways to go, but the improvements overall are pretty clear there. After all, getting things rendering properly is their first task, then performance comes after.
Another nice touch, is the addition of "mouse to controller button binding" for people to enjoy games on PC with a mouse like any other PC game. They do mention it won't be without fault, since PS3 games simply weren't designed for a mouse. They will also allow you to tweak the settings to your liking.
Quoting: HadBabitsGood stuff :) You can't stop piracy, but you can preserve history for future generations; and not just the titles the publishers deem 'worthy' of a $60 remaster.
I don't know about preserving history so much as just preserving the ability to play the game at all. If you look at the internet archive, there are all kinds of DOS programs - not just games - that don't run and can't be updated because there is no source code archived to update. The first MDK is a great example. Shiny saved the source for MDK2, so in recent years there was a remaster. The first game would have to be remade from the ground up, so the best that you're ever going to do is DOSBox.
Red Dead Redemption will never be ported to any PC platform because it's a complete mess of duct taped together game engine builds literally cobbled together two different versions of GTA. Porting it over to anything else would first require porting it to a new engine. Well, what happens when the last PS3 quits working? If you love cowboy shooters, you just lost one of the best.
One of the trends that Half Life spawned back in the very late 1990's was to include both good mod tools and then a SDK.Because Warren Spector put Deus Ex out with an SDK there is currently the ability to play the game in DirectX10 because a computer science student coded up the renderer for it just a few years ago, and it works with all the other Unreal engine games from that period that also shipped with an SDK. Yes, it would have been nce if he had just gone OpenGL, but the point is that the game can actually get updated to run on new systems just because of that SDK. Freespace, DOOM3, and a few others have had their engine source codes GPLed, and frankly I think that should be made mandatory under consumer protection law. After ten years you either update the game to current standards or you gpl the source so that the fans can do it for you.
Plus there's also something else at work here. I paid $2000 for a computer, I DON'T WANT TO PAY MORE FOR AN INFERIOR COMPUTER THAT REALLY ONLY SERVES AS A DRM BOX. Bring your game where I live and I will happily buy it from you as my Steam library can attest to. SEGA has their Genesis collection up on Steam. Guess what, nobody pirates Genesis games anymore, which makes me surprised that they haven't put up all the Dreamcast titles, too. Maybe even their arcade games. Meanwhile, I guess Nintendo doesn't like easy money because yes I really would like to pay Zelda:Link to the Past in 4K. Or Starfox64. Or Mario3. Or Contra. And I would love to pay to provide me with that ease of use.
The Bard's Tale trilogy is another one of those where they apparently lost the source code and the remaster had to be programmed from the ground up.
I totally agree about mandating an open sourcing of engines after X amount of years. It's not like they'd have to give away any of the data. Of course if you follow what RMS suggests, it's the same thing, though he'd rather it be open source from the start.
Quoting: HadBabitsGood stuff :) You can't stop piracy, but you can preserve history for future generations; and not just the titles the publishers deem 'worthy' of a $60 remaster.
Fuck piracy & devs who get buttshy and agressive with emulators. If I want to take my damn console disk and shove it into my computer or turn it into an ISO to play from my SSD that's my business.
The majority of people are obviously not intelligent enough to know how to pirate, not perseveranct enough to figure out how to make it work with X emulator bug, etc... and if I want to buy old used games from ebay or my local game shop -- I am buying the rights to use that product.
For games that just work on emulators, I fucking guarantee you that for N64 that games like Ocarina of Time wouldn't be nearly as big or even have had the market to create a 3DS Remaster without the pirate market considering the fans would have been LONG GONE.
In the same way that it's said that Microsoft and Adobe would prefer people to pirate their products (non business users) instead of going with a competitor, there is future financial benefit created by people who use those products even if obtained illegally.
This comment is from a Scientific Economic, Social Behavioral & Market perspectives, not the legal or moral.
Fearful devs just need to let it go and not be run by fear. That's what makes them create such shitty products like Star Wars Episodes 1-3, when the fear of doing new things will loose money the product turns to shit fast.
Last edited by ElectricPrism on 21 September 2018 at 5:15 pm UTC
It wasn't really started by Valve. id did it with Quake 2 before Valve with Half-Life and this was a continuation of an earlier tradition with for example QuakeC for Quake and .con files in Shadow Warrior and Duke Nukem 3D. But I think Quake 2 was the first one to were actual (in that case) C source code was released. Basically something like that was the standard for the FPS games of the mid to late 90s and to around the mid 2000s. Even games released by companies such as Activision. I wish it still was.
id went even further by, as you noted, releasing the full source code of their games(engine and all, in later releases also including tool source code) after a certain number of years. (I should note that unlike the id source code releases which were under the GPL the Descent games source code had a custom license that doesn't comply with either the free software definition or the open source definition).
Last edited by Kristian on 21 September 2018 at 7:41 pm UTC
Quoting: Kristian"One of the trends that Half Life spawned back in the very late 1990's was to include both good mod tools and then a SDK."
It wasn't really started by Valve. id did it with Quake 2 before Valve with Half-Life and this was a continuation of an earlier tradition with for example QuakeC for Quake and .con files in Shadow Warrior and Duke Nukem 3D. But I think Quake 2 was the first one to were actual (in that case) C source code was released. Basically something like that was the standard for the FPS games of the mid to late 90s and to around the mid 2000s. Even games released by companies such as Activision. I wish it still was.
id went even further by, as you noted, releasing the full source code of their games(engine and all, in later releases also including tool source code) after a certain number of years. (I should note that unlike the id source code releases which were under the GPL the Descent games source code had a custom license that doesn't comply with either the free software definition or the open source definition).
Pretty sure Doom was the first one that they released the source to, and there were modding tools long before that. Not sure if you'd call them a full SDK, but there definitely were tools available.
Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 22 September 2018 at 6:49 am UTC
Quoting: TheSHEEEPDoes anyone know of a list (you know, like the Steam Play compatibility list or WineDB) of games for PS3 and how well they run on the emulator?
https://rpcs3.net/compatibility
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