Ps2 emulator android - possible?

Post whatever!
Exophase
Posts:1716
Joined:Mon Aug 05, 2013 9:08 pm
Re: Ps2 emulator android - possible?

Post by Exophase » Wed Oct 16, 2013 1:49 pm

Howdareme wrote:Phone's will be the same level as pc's next year.
Phones aren't going to undergo an enormous shift in CPU power between this year and next year. They got a lot more powerful over the last several years because phones were allowed to use more and more power. This could happen for two reasons - one is that it was balanced by improvements in idle/light usage power consumption, the other is that phones have gotten moderately larger. These days they're pushing at power limits, it's normal for a phone to undergo thermal throttling when under heavy CPU utilization for more than a very short period of time. Larger/thicker devices with more cooling like nVidia's Shield are allowing better performance than their phone counterparts, but not a huge amount.

Same thing happened on desktops, it's why over the last several years both CPU and GPU performance improvements have slowed down a lot. But decent sized laptops still allow ~10 times the maximum power consumption as phones, desktops allow a lot more than that. That doesn't mean you get 10x the performance (perf/W efficiency scaling doesn't work that way) but you still end up with something that can get a lot faster.

mckimiaklopa
Posts:11
Joined:Mon Sep 23, 2013 12:35 am
Location:Bataan,Philippines

Re: Ps2 emulator android - possible?

Post by mckimiaklopa » Thu Oct 17, 2013 4:16 am

I just found out that there is a hack that allows software emulation of any ps2 game on any ps3 console(even on the slim versions and on consoles without the EE or the GS)

Jay Haru
Posts:1796
Joined:Sat Aug 10, 2013 1:10 pm
Location:Pasig, Philippines

Re: Ps2 emulator android - possible?

Post by Jay Haru » Thu Oct 17, 2013 5:50 am

mckimiaklopa wrote:I just found out that there is a hack that allows software emulation of any ps2 game on any ps3 console(even on the slim versions and on consoles without the EE or the GS)
and youre now off topic.
Behold my mighty
Image

mckimiaklopa
Posts:11
Joined:Mon Sep 23, 2013 12:35 am
Location:Bataan,Philippines

Re: Ps2 emulator android - possible?

Post by mckimiaklopa » Sat Mar 15, 2014 5:39 pm

I posted the above because it at least proves thay sony did not really give up on ps2 emulation.

Anyway for a project as big as the ps2 emu,i think it won't be wise to wait for powerful hardware before making it(it'll just waste the opportunity to perfect a said emu)

Did rpcs3 and pcsx2 wait for powerful hardware before they were born?
No.
If pcsx2 did wait for powerful hardware,than it would have been born in 2007 and we would only get today 30% compatibility plus slow speed on hardware that are capable of running it 100% if optimized.

Same should be said about ps2 on android.Sure,current hardware would probably get 0.000000001 fps for ps2 emulation done this year,but at least it exists and there would still huge space for improvement

Exophase
Posts:1716
Joined:Mon Aug 05, 2013 9:08 pm

Re: Ps2 emulator android - possible?

Post by Exophase » Sat Mar 15, 2014 8:02 pm

I agree, you don't need to wait for powerful enough hardware before working on an emulator. And PCSX2 could be adapted for Android, including an ARMv7a recompiler and OGL ES targeting, there doesn't necessarily need to be a totally new emulator.

However, you should bear this in mind: if your emulation is really slow it'll take a lot longer to test/debug the emulator. And it'll be a lot more frustrating. You'll have a much harder time getting beta testers to do it. So your productivity will probably be heavily impacted.

When I first started DraStic I did a very simple interpreter to help make it easier to get the emulation right. I didn't plan on doing a recompiler until I had fairly decent compatibiltiy - that was the approach I took with gpSP and it worked okay there. But in this case the emulator was so incredibly slow with just the interpreter, especially since early on I was doing a lot of development on an Atom N270 netbook. I started work on the x86 recompiler a lot earlier than planned just to get something more usable.

mckimiaklopa
Posts:11
Joined:Mon Sep 23, 2013 12:35 am
Location:Bataan,Philippines

Re: Ps2 emulator android - possible?

Post by mckimiaklopa » Sat Mar 15, 2014 9:36 pm

Yeah i agree with you,the slower the initial performance,the harder the development.

That's why whoever is developing ps2 for android must have great patience and is hardworking.

I've been seeing some people on the internet starting to develop the said emulator,but they have either not started or just gave up entirely

I REALLY can see why(2 million codes)

TnA.Plastic
Posts:29
Joined:Mon Jan 20, 2014 5:57 am

Re: Ps2 emulator android - possible?

Post by TnA.Plastic » Sat Mar 22, 2014 7:45 pm

We won't see an emulator capable of running all PS2-Stuff fluid until the next 2-3 years for sure... (even if we'd had a good and optimized emulation)
I'm not sure, but AFAIK the PS2 can't be emulated on higher abstractions.

Emulators are Latency-Dependent...
The EE uses RD-RAM on-die... and the way, the DMAC cycles Data makes it harder due to latency...

But... SoCs are way better than normal PCs for some kind of this stuff, due to shorter physical lenght a signal has to go. The CPU just has to be powerfull enough...

Exophase
Posts:1716
Joined:Mon Aug 05, 2013 9:08 pm

Re: Ps2 emulator android - possible?

Post by Exophase » Sat Mar 22, 2014 7:58 pm

I've yet to actually see a mobile SoC that has main RAM latency anywhere close to as low as an x86 desktop/laptop. The latency you get due to propagation delay (time it takes to go from the RAM chip to the CPU chip) is actually very small even on a desktop motherboard, for copper wiring it's only about 1ns every 6 inches. So on dektops not even 1ns, which is a very small portion of the latency.. so you don't actually save much of anything using PoP RAM that's very close to the SoC, which still have latencies of > 100ns. I don't really know for sure what causes this but I think it's impacted by sharing the bus with a bunch of other peripherals (including GPU), having the bus less tightly integrated with the CPU cache hierarchy, optimizing for low power consumption (switching out of low power states takes time) and just having less expertise in design.

PS2's RDRAM probably didn't have very low latency anyway, RAMBUS has been notorious for poor latency in their RAM. It's not RDRAM on the GPU die, it's just normal eDRAM. Latency isn't that important there, it's more the massive bandwidth it has. No mobile SoC has bandwidth anywhere close to what PS2's GPU has, but you don't necessarily need anywhere close to emulate it using different techniques than it did.

User avatar
huckleberrypie
Posts:442
Joined:Sat May 31, 2014 4:21 am
Contact:

Re: Ps2 emulator android - possible?

Post by huckleberrypie » Sat May 31, 2014 4:52 am

Exophase wrote:I've yet to actually see a mobile SoC that has main RAM latency anywhere close to as low as an x86 desktop/laptop. The latency you get due to propagation delay (time it takes to go from the RAM chip to the CPU chip) is actually very small even on a desktop motherboard, for copper wiring it's only about 1ns every 6 inches. So on dektops not even 1ns, which is a very small portion of the latency.. so you don't actually save much of anything using PoP RAM that's very close to the SoC, which still have latencies of > 100ns. I don't really know for sure what causes this but I think it's impacted by sharing the bus with a bunch of other peripherals (including GPU), having the bus less tightly integrated with the CPU cache hierarchy, optimizing for low power consumption (switching out of low power states takes time) and just having less expertise in design.

PS2's RDRAM probably didn't have very low latency anyway, RAMBUS has been notorious for poor latency in their RAM. It's not RDRAM on the GPU die, it's just normal eDRAM. Latency isn't that important there, it's more the massive bandwidth it has. No mobile SoC has bandwidth anywhere close to what PS2's GPU has, but you don't necessarily need anywhere close to emulate it using different techniques than it did.
Yeah, heard about similar issues by N64 developers when they wrote software for it, besides the 4KB texture limit. Anyway, back on topic - if you ask me it all boils down to how complex the PS2's architecture is. PPSSPP ran like the Road Runner on most phones, probably due to how simpler the PSP platform is (or at least that's what I think).

tomkatt
Posts:81
Joined:Sun Nov 17, 2013 5:41 pm

Re: Ps2 emulator android - possible?

Post by tomkatt » Fri Jun 13, 2014 5:34 pm

To my knowledge, what would make it most difficult to get PS2 emulation on Android is simply architecture problems. It was made for x86 and considerations weren't made for other platforms.

PCSX2 is so entrenched in 32-bit x86 architecture that it has yet to be forked for or to include x64 PC support, let alone other platforms like Android, and there are detractors who claim it simply can't be done with the current code base.

So the main issue is that while a new emulator may be able to learn from the groundwork set up by the PCSX2 team and develop at a quicker pace, it would still need a near total rewrite to work on a different architecture (x64 or ARM).

Post Reply