you'd have to use copied game ISOs (prohibited),
Making the ISOs is not illegal. Distributing them is, however.
That depends entirely on what country you live in. Some countries in particular have some pretty horrible anti-consumer laws, and new laws are being made each day.
I'd wager on both companies working on emulators -- perhaps not with full support for the entire back-catalog, but the popular titles plus whatever is lucky enough to come along for the ride, as the 360 did with the original XBox.
On one hand, emulating contemporary consoles on a PC is difficult because of architecture differences, and most especially because of the lack of suitably low-level interfaces to map the console interfaces to. I suspect that an API like Mantle would ease some of that pain on the PC, and that console-bound emulators get to sidestep at least that issue. Still no cake-walk to close the gap, but either setup reduces the distance between hither and yon pretty significantly I'd imagine.
Interestingly, but perhaps coincidentally, if you do the math on the 4 extra compute-only GPU clusters in the PS4, it works out to be exactly the same theoretical throughput as all 8 SPEs in the Cell processor. I think with relatively similar programming models, it probably wouldn't be beyond the realm of feasibility to write a dynamic recompiler to translate those SPE programs to vectorized GPU code. With that processing burden off the PS4 CPUs, there would seem to be plenty of horsepower left to emulate the PS3s single, in-order, dual-threaded PPC CPU.
If Sony can offload the SPE code in this way, they've probably got an easier task of emulating their previous console on the new one than Microsoft does (because Microsoft has 3x the PPC CPUs to emulate on an equal number of x86 cores as PS4, each with an extended altivec unit to make up for.)
Well the rumor on the Sony side was they'd integrate OnLive into the console and use that to deliver PS3 compatibility. That's the rumor I heard anyway.
I'd wager on both companies working on emulators -- perhaps not with full support for the entire back-catalog, but the popular titles plus whatever is lucky enough to come along for the ride, as the 360 did with the original XBox.
Rumour has it that MS themselves are working on a 360 emulator, to sell the back-catalogue of 360 games on Windows 8 (as a reinvention of the soon to be discontinued "Games for Windows Live" brand) and enable backwards compatibility on the Xbone.
A power-PC emulator for x86 systems? I'm still waiting a decent ARM emulator.. I know that MS could do some "binary magic" since it is MS stuff on MS stuff.... but rumours like those are usually just a joke... GFWL is just dead as system, sure they are gonna replace it with some-thing else (hopefully with a less-annoying DRM)...
Well the rumor on the Sony side was they'd integrate OnLive into the console and use that to deliver PS3 compatibility. That's the rumor I heard anyway.
I'd wager on both companies working on emulators -- perhaps not with full support for the entire back-catalog, but the popular titles plus whatever is lucky enough to come along for the ride, as the 360 did with the original XBox.
this could happen: AMD is working on virtualization and cloud/stream gaming (this last called "RapidFire"). Both Sony and especially Microsoft could be use those systems:
http://www.amd.com/us/products/workstation/graphics/software/Pages/remote-graphics-vdi.aspx
http://developer.amd.com/apu/home/sessions/
https://vts.inxpo.com/scripts/Server.nxp?LASCmd=AI:4;F:QS!10100&ShowKey=16356
It took almost 10 years for the ps2 emulator to reach version 1.0 and be usable and run smooth with recent computers (mine get 50-60 fps, sometime it kinda slowdown a bit), so, i guess that one will take a while (ps3 and xbox 360 aren't even able to play commercial games yet, except maybe 1 or 2)...
It took almost 10 years for the ps2 emulator to reach version 1.0 and be usable and run smooth
There is a world of difference between hobbyists building an emulator via reverse engineering, versus Microsoft/Sony's platform engineers building a thin emulator over their own hardware/OS.
A power-PC emulator for x86 systems?
As I mentioned previously, Apple had this running 6 years ago (complete with Altivec support) - a seasoned platform engineering team can certainly pull this off.
The GPU architecture is probably more of a hassle, but provided they have some vendor support from AMD, I doubt it to be insurmountable.
All emulators I've used stem from the following website:
They've all worked until now, albeit the newer ones a little slowly.
It is in the United States. Circumventing the DRM on the discs to make the ISO is in violation to the DMCA. Heck, making digital copies of DVDs is illegal in the USA as well.you'd have to use copied game ISOs (prohibited),
Making the ISOs is not illegal. Distributing them is, however.
It is in the United States. Circumventing the DRM on the discs to make the ISO is in violation to the DMCA. Heck, making digital copies of DVDs is illegal in the USA as well.
you'd have to use copied game ISOs (prohibited),
Making the ISOs is not illegal. Distributing them is, however.
Yea, our laws suck.
Including archival copies?
