PlayStation 3 emulator 'RPCS3' is coming along nicely with some major improvements

Good 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.

Good 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.

Ha, is that why Red Dead Redemption is stuck on the PS3. My PS3 is failing, otherwise I'd try to spend more time playing that!

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.

Someone revive emuparadise already!

Good 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 Sep 2018 at 5:15 pm UTC

"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).


Last edited by Kristian on 21 Sep 2018 at 7:41 pm UTC

"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.

Anyone has a tip how to configure controllers with this? The popup window is so large on my Laptop (1920x1080 resolution) that I can't actually reach the probably existing "apply/save" buttons at the lower right :(

Does 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?


Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 22 Sep 2018 at 6:49 am UTC

Does 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

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.

Nintendo loves money more than anything. That's why they don't want to provide. Selling their games to PC would mean they lose control of it. Sega already lost the console battle, but Nintendo is still going and knows well that controlling the hardware and software means controlling it all. So they can resell the same games again and again.

Good 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.

Wasn't Nintendo caught selling roms at one point ?
Someone bought a Super Mario game from them on one of their virtual consoles and took apart the file and found that some specific file signature did not match the official one.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-01-18-did-nintendo-download-a-mario-rom-and-sell-it-back-to-us

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.

I can attest to that. I live in India and I have never ever met anyone who has bought a Microsoft or Adobe license. Microsoft windows license often come with laptops now but no one actively buys them. The same with Adobe licenses.

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.

I can attest to that. I live in India and I have never ever met anyone who has bought a Microsoft or Adobe license. Microsoft windows license often come with laptops now but no one actively buys them. The same with Adobe licenses.

I'm VERY American and I haven't paid for a copy of Windows since 1996. Other than a four month free trial of Vista, Iused pirated copies the whole time. It's actually one of the things that has slowed the grow of Linux - Linux costs no money to download and use. Pirated Windows costs no money to download and use, and everything runs natively on it. This is why Microsoft really never brutally cracked down on Windows piracy. As long as you were in their ecosystem you were still counted in their marketshare and the control that translated to was worth way more than a one time payment from random users.

Microsoft is driving the success of Linux. Hell, Adobe is driving the success of GIMP, just like Maya's(and 3D StudioMax) outrageous fees are driving the development of Blender.