I meant that it doesn’t actually have to emulate much. it just runs the game as if it were native, more similar to how wine works than old school emulators. with the older consoles, it has to translate the instructions from the original code into instructions for the PC hardware and insert software approximations of stuff the hardware does on the physical consoles. this invariably makes what used to take just a few instructions take multiple hundreds of clock cycles or worse.
but on the ps4, it’s just a “fancy”, underpowered desktop pc. (fancy, as in, they talked Intel/AMD into providing a custom version of their normal cpu/gpu that could run within the power/thermal budgets of the ps4 – so it runs slower than it would if you built the computer yourself.) it’s not easy to get the games themselves running as a developer for the emulator – you have to teach your computer how to read the executables and interpret them + provide system library equivalents, but you don’t have to fake entire pieces of hardware that don’t exist.
the ps5 is even further down this path… it’s just a low tier desktop PC running a custom OS built on top of one of the BSD’s (iirc). it’s why the ps5 -> PC ports come out so much faster than previous gens – don’t have to do all that much as a developer to get it working on PC. I’m honestly surprised we don’t have a functional “emulator” for it already.
it made more sense when custom hardware for games could deliver more consistent results than what was possible from PCs. but that stopped being true in the 2010s so they just started buying the parts from the usual vendors. that’s also one of the reasons consoles got so much more expensive – they’re literally just PCs now and cost at least as much as.
I want one too but I play so few games that I think it’s just pursuit-of-shiny-toy. if it weren’t linux, I’d already have talked myself out of it. but more linux games means I might actually play something other than Disco Elysium for the Nth time.
Yeah I kind of want one as a shiny toy too. I was chatting with someone who plays Final Fantasy XI on it via a private server and I thought it was such a cool idea. But it’s honestly nothing I can’t already do on PC.
Yup it is lol. Wow might not work the same, but FFXI was originally on console and has console like controls. It’s actually easier to play it with a pad than m&k.
I meant that it doesn’t actually have to emulate much. it just runs the game as if it were native, more similar to how wine works than old school emulators. with the older consoles, it has to translate the instructions from the original code into instructions for the PC hardware and insert software approximations of stuff the hardware does on the physical consoles. this invariably makes what used to take just a few instructions take multiple hundreds of clock cycles or worse.
but on the ps4, it’s just a “fancy”, underpowered desktop pc. (fancy, as in, they talked Intel/AMD into providing a custom version of their normal cpu/gpu that could run within the power/thermal budgets of the ps4 – so it runs slower than it would if you built the computer yourself.) it’s not easy to get the games themselves running as a developer for the emulator – you have to teach your computer how to read the executables and interpret them + provide system library equivalents, but you don’t have to fake entire pieces of hardware that don’t exist.
the ps5 is even further down this path… it’s just a low tier desktop PC running a custom OS built on top of one of the BSD’s (iirc). it’s why the ps5 -> PC ports come out so much faster than previous gens – don’t have to do all that much as a developer to get it working on PC. I’m honestly surprised we don’t have a functional “emulator” for it already.
Hm, I didn’t know that about the PS4/5 that they are just like weaker PCs. I thought they still had weird programming like the PS3
it made more sense when custom hardware for games could deliver more consistent results than what was possible from PCs. but that stopped being true in the 2010s so they just started buying the parts from the usual vendors. that’s also one of the reasons consoles got so much more expensive – they’re literally just PCs now and cost at least as much as.
Yeah I’ve noticed that, that console are now PC price. Which is why I’d rather just stick with PC but the steam deck looks pretty cool.
I want one too but I play so few games that I think it’s just pursuit-of-shiny-toy. if it weren’t linux, I’d already have talked myself out of it. but more linux games means I might actually play something other than Disco Elysium for the Nth time.
Yeah I kind of want one as a shiny toy too. I was chatting with someone who plays Final Fantasy XI on it via a private server and I thought it was such a cool idea. But it’s honestly nothing I can’t already do on PC.
isn’t that an MMO? trying to imagine playing WoW on a steam deck and losing my mind lmao
Yup it is lol. Wow might not work the same, but FFXI was originally on console and has console like controls. It’s actually easier to play it with a pad than m&k.
ohh interesting. that makes more sense than WoW where even a keyboard doesn’t have enough buttons.