So now that there are linux drivers for the wiimote...

N

nonameo

Gawd
Joined
Jan 8, 2006
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I wonder if we'll see a wii emulator for the PS3???

seems plausible. Don't know if the PS3 has enough horsepower to do it, though.
 
I might be wrong, but I think the access to the horsepower is massively limited in PS3 linux so probably not.
 
So tempted to go buy a Wiimote now, and hack up those drivers to make it work w/ Compiz or similar...

Mmm, using Wiimote to move around & rotate 3D desktop. Wheee!
 
IIRC linux can't use the RSX... so if the processor alone can emulate the Wii then maybe...
 
VoodooChi|d said:
IIRC linux can't use the RSX... so if the processor alone can emulate the Wii then maybe...
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Not going to happen. The Wii may be underpowered by modern standards, but there's no way the Cell alone could emulate it.
 
Rocketpig said:
Not going to happen. The Wii may be underpowered by modern standards, but there's no way the Cell alone could emulate it.
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That is quite a bold statement. Mind elaborating how you came to this conclusion? Looking at the F@H slides, the Cell has about 50% of the "folding performance" of an x1900xtx. If the Wii is as underpowered as I am told by everyone, the Cell should have little trouble keeping up.
 
drizzt81 said:
That is quite a bold statement. Mind elaborating how you came to this conclusion? Looking at the F@H slides, the Cell has about 50% of the "folding performance" of an x1900xtx. If the Wii is as underpowered as I am told by everyone, the Cell should have little trouble keeping up.
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Well, the fact that any CPU has to be massively more powerful than the GPU it's emulating gives me a pretty good indication that it won't work.

It's not as if the Wii is running a 400mhz Celeron here. While the PS3 is powerful, CPU-only emulation is extremely rough on the processor and I don't think the Cell could do it.
 
BTW, the Wii runs a 729mhz PPC processor and depending on who you talk to, that's the equivalent of a 900mhz-1.1ghz x86 chip (arguments vary on this subject).

It also runs a 243mhz GPU with 64 megs of GDDR3 memory.

While not a barnburner by any means, it's still too powerful for CPU-only emulation IMO.
 
You won't see a Wii emulator for any platform for perhaps another 5 years.

I don't think the PS3 is powerful enough for full speed Wii emulation. How are the N64 emulators for PSP coming along?
 
The biggest problem with emulating one console on another console is undoubtedly the architectural difference. Sure, the Cell has a good amount of raw power, but in order to render Wii games, it would also have to pretend to act exactly like the Wii in order to do so. This would be no small task, and I'm highly skeptical that it'll be pulled off anytime soon, if at all.
 
FoolOnTheHill said:
The biggest problem with emulating one console on another console is undoubtedly the architectural difference. Sure, the Cell has a good amount of raw power, but in order to render Wii games, it would also have to pretend to act exactly like the Wii in order to do so. This would be no small task, and I'm highly skeptical that it'll be pulled off anytime soon, if at all.
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Exactly. And then double that effort since it can't use its GPU to render the Wii graphics.
 
Rocketpig said:
Exactly. And then double that effort since it can't use its GPU to render the Wii graphics.
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Yup in my example, I was talking specifically about the Cell, and in real world purposes this would be the case for anyone attempting a Wii emulator on PS3 linux, due to no 3d drivers for the RSX.

I wouldn't hold my breath about getting better drivers, either. I'm very much doubting that Nvidia wants to spend the effort to improve 3d performance under PS3's Linux when they already have plenty to deal with on their retail cards. There simply wouldn't be anything in it for them, unless Sony has gaming plans for Linux, which sounds silly to me...
 
Rocketpig said:
BTW, the Wii runs a 729mhz PPC processor and depending on who you talk to, that's the equivalent of a 900mhz-1.1ghz x86 chip (arguments vary on this subject).

It also runs a 243mhz GPU with 64 megs of GDDR3 memory.

While not a barnburner by any means, it's still too powerful for CPU-only emulation IMO.
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If you had RSX, I think you could do it. The Cell uses the basic PowerPC ISA. Theoretically, you wouldn't need to do instruction-level emulation, and that would save a lot of CPU time. Think in terms of VMWare, for instance, rather than Bochs. The CPU in the Wii is also closer to a G3 than a G5 - it doesn't have a lot of those fancy instructions that got added in later PPC CPUs.

The GPU is relatively primitive feature-wise, by modern standards, and lacks programmable shaders. I'm not saying it would be easy to emulate, but I don't think it's the toughest problem I've heard of. I mean, the 360 guys wrote a pretty decent emulator of the original Xbox, and the Wii isn't THAT far ahead of it, at least with current software.
 
erwos said:
If you had RSX, I think you could do it. The Cell uses the basic PowerPC ISA. Theoretically, you wouldn't need to do instruction-level emulation, and that would save a lot of CPU time. Think in terms of VMWare, for instance, rather than Bochs. The CPU in the Wii is also closer to a G3 than a G5 - it doesn't have a lot of those fancy instructions that got added in later PPC CPUs.

The GPU is relatively primitive feature-wise, by modern standards, and lacks programmable shaders. I'm not saying it would be easy to emulate, but I don't think it's the toughest problem I've heard of. I mean, the 360 guys wrote a pretty decent emulator of the original Xbox, and the Wii isn't THAT far ahead of it, at least with current software.
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With the RSX, you're at least in the realm of it possibly happening. Like you said, the 360 guys emulated the XBOX pretty well and across the board, the specs are similar (PS3/360 vs. Wii/XBOX). I doubt it would ever run that well (the Wii is a bit more powerful than the XBOX), but they could probably get it to run.

With that said, without the RSX, no chance in hell.
 
I seem to recall that both the cpu and gpu in the wii are custom parts. I know the cpu is ppc based but I believe I read that it was modified to have extra instructions or something. The cell, being a stripped down ppc arch, would have to emulate not only these extra instructions but also what was removed from it. Architectural differences alone may be to large to allow for emulation of the wii on the ps3. I do wonder if anyone will get the nvidia linux driver working for the ps3 though :p

Edit:
Can someone explain what the hell this means?
erwos in reference to the wii gpu said:
and lacks programmable shaders
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erwos said:
If you had RSX, I think you could do it. The Cell uses the basic PowerPC ISA. Theoretically, you wouldn't need to do instruction-level emulation, and that would save a lot of CPU time. Think in terms of VMWare, for instance, rather than Bochs. The CPU in the Wii is also closer to a G3 than a G5 - it doesn't have a lot of those fancy instructions that got added in later PPC CPUs.

The GPU is relatively primitive feature-wise, by modern standards, and lacks programmable shaders. I'm not saying it would be easy to emulate, but I don't think it's the toughest problem I've heard of. I mean, the 360 guys wrote a pretty decent emulator of the original Xbox, and the Wii isn't THAT far ahead of it, at least with current software.
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I suppose, assuming quality Linux drivers for the RSX magically appear (and that is a huge assumption), it could be possible to make a Wii emulator. I suppose it depends on where this discussion is meant to go, are we talking about possibility or probability? Sure, it may be technically possible to emulate the Wii on the PS3, but is it probable?

I say no chance, due to the perviously mentioned issues with emulating the Wii graphics core on the Cell and the lack of 3d RSX drivers. Although it would be very interesting to be proven wrong...
 
Rocketpig said:
With the RSX, you're at least in the realm of it possibly happening. Like you said, the 360 guys emulated the XBOX pretty well and across the board, the specs are similar (PS3/360 vs. Wii/XBOX). I doubt it would ever run that well (the Wii is a bit more powerful than the XBOX), but they could probably get it to run.

With that said, without the RSX, no chance in hell.
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In this case, though, you're talking about running the emulator on top of linux, which will slow it down even more. I'm not exactly sure how the 360 does its emulation but I'd be willing to bet that they communicate directly with the hardware at certain times (probably in assembly) where speed is essential, bypassing the os completely. Either that, or the 360 os was designed with these hardware hooks built in, seeing as this was intended to be a major feature (something like paravirtualization, perhaps?). Some hobbist programmer wouldn't have these luxuries with the ps3 under this environment.
 
Rocketpig said:
Not going to happen. The Wii may be underpowered by modern standards, but there's no way the Cell alone could emulate it.
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PS3 couldn't emulate it, because it doesn't have the memory bandwidth...period, Wii has ultra mega super duper fast ram.
 
Spaceman_Spiff said:
In this case, though, you're talking about running the emulator on top of linux, which will slow it down even more. I'm not exactly sure how the 360 does its emulation but I'd be willing to bet that they communicate directly with the hardware at certain times (probably in assembly) where speed is essential, bypassing the os completely. Either that, or the 360 os was designed with these hardware hooks built in, seeing as this was intended to be a major feature (something like paravirtualization, perhaps?). Some hobbist programmer wouldn't have these luxuries with the ps3 under this environment.
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Good point. I completely overlooked that they would have to be running a rather substantial OS behind it all while also emulating the Wii.
 
I'm pretty sure no console in this generation can be emulated yet. Probably a couple more generations of videocards and processors yea but right now its just rediculous to think u can emulate a wii already when its got so many custom optimizations and a totally different architechure than the others. It requires atleast a 700mhz cpu to emulate a n64 game with a decent videocard and that was 1996 hardware. No console or computer can emulate the gamecube yet at full speed. Everyones thinking ahead of themselves here lol. I saw a few guys playing the wiimote with halflife2. Thats mostly it lol. What i'm tryin to say is its not gonna happen for years to come :)
 
MrBojangels said:
PS3 couldn't emulate it, because it doesn't have the memory bandwidth...period, Wii has ultra mega super duper fast ram.
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This used to be true when the Gamecube was new and shiny, but if you actually look at the specs of said RAM, the stuff in the 360 and PS3 exceeds it handily.
 
erwos said:
This used to be true when the Gamecube was new and shiny, but if you actually look at the specs of said RAM, the stuff in the 360 and PS3 exceeds it handily.
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Doesn't the Wii use GDDR3? Am I missing something?
 
Rocketpig said:
Doesn't the Wii use GDDR3? Am I missing something?
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Just using GDDR3 doesn't give it the same memory bandwidth. The latency is presumably going to be similar, since both are running at 700mhz (or so Wikipedia claims), but the bus size itself is smaller. The dedicated video memory is Gamecube-esque, which is to say, not all that impressive, although you can apparently access main memory from the GPU now (which will prove handy!).

I hate bringing out this link, because it's unsubstantiated, but the author was dead-on about everything else, so it's food for thought:
http://www.maxconsole.net/?mode=news&newsid=8802
 
pr0pensity said:
Wrong.
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Are you talking about the Wii? If so, I'm not sure that actually classifies as emulation, given the fact that it's very similar hardware, just beefed up. So really, it's not emulating anything, just using part of the faster hardware to run the game as it was on the Gamecube.

If you don't mean the Wii, then what are you referring to?
 
FoolOnTheHill said:
If you don't mean the Wii, then what are you referring to?
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There is at least once Gamecube emulator that can run commercial games.
 
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