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→Why does x86 architecture even need to be emulated on PCs which are already x86 to begin with?
I get that the x86 architecture is huge so even though it is well documented it would be difficult to emulate, but since PCs are already x86 anyway, why is there even a need to? Shouldn't all that needs to be emulated is the Orbis OS or whatever? And the Orbis OS is based on FreeBSD which is open source, so it would seem to me that this should be very easy to sort out if people would just approach this the easy way instead of trying to emulate an entire architecture which there is no need to do because PC is already that architecture anyway. And if I'm wrong then please tell me the reason why I'm wrong because I would like to know.
:I was in the process of rewriting the page before, but I'm just gonna share this early. Fail0verflow discovered [https://fail0verflow.com/blog/2016/console-hacking-2016-postscript/ the "secondary processor" '''is actually ''' the primary system ] (and even they are confused as hell about Sony's design). The PS4 is just actually an ARM system-on-a-chip that runs its own OS-- Orbis OS-- and forwards games to run directly on the x86 processor and , graphics card. ''I don't have a link to their presentation on it but it should still be on their website, of courseand shared memory.'' That means for proper PS4 emulation, you would need to "fake" a game's computer ''on top'' of a faked operating system's computer, something even Dolphin has struggled with over the past few years (they've talked extensively on the blog about implementing Starlet at a higher-level). Complicating things even more is the memory. The CPU and GPU share it. On the IBM platform, they're dedicated (VRAM and SDRAM), separate components. [https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch10.html#hwvirt This writeup from the VirtualBox team] explains how they handle hardware abstraction on x86, explaining why virtualized software can be almost or just as fast as native software sometimeswhen it's natively run. Truth is, it could very well be possible to get games going quickly provided all the tools were in place to do that, but most people don't have 8 core CPUs, and it took ten years before PS3 emulation ever got anywhere for all of its own reasons. The system-on-a-chip discovery also explains why video capture and music playback on any game is possible.
