PlayStation 3 emulators

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Revision as of 01:45, 13 February 2016 by SonofUgly (talk | contribs)
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The PlayStation 3 console

The PlayStation 3 (known shorthand as PS3) is a console by Sony, released in 2006/2007. This console is notorious for being difficult to work with, due to the newly-introduced Cell Broadband Engine architecture that no game developer outside of Sony has worked with prior to launch.

Emulators

Name Operating System(s) Latest Release Version Active Recommended
RPCS3 Windows, Linux Git
Nucleus Windows, Linux 0.0.4
Short Waves Windows 0.0.2

Comparisons

  • RPCS3 is at its very early stages, and it shows a lot of promise. It can boot quite a few commercial games right now, (albeit most of them run at <1FPS, have heavy glitches, and crash pretty early on) and even more games can boot their splash screens.
  • Nucleus is one man project aiming for LLE, some AOT emulation, and portability.
  • Short Waves was made by an unknown developer. It could run a few complex tests that RPCS3 couldn't at the time it released, but it hasn't been updated since 2014.

Emulation issues

Due to the complexity of the Cell processor architecture, plus the fact that it would take a LOT of resources to get such games emulated (as an example, see specifications in Dolphin and PCSX2 for their respective consoles), there is no usable emulator for PS3.