Couple years ago I got into emulators super hard. Nowadays I have a laptop with an i7 in it but years ago I had a Pentium M. During that time it was amazing that I could even play snes on my laptop. When I found out about PS2 emulators my PS2 was dead and it was the only thing I wanted to play. Ever. Even still I will probably have a specific TV only for my current PS2.
When I first was researching it I wanted to know if it were possible to have a PS2 emulator on a laptop. At the time I know I had hardware that could barely run pentium 4 age stuff (but a pentium M is a pentium 3 so knowing that later makes that shit sensible) and I knew that SNES emulators were probably the top of the belt for me at that point. What I read up basically told me that at the initial release of PS2ALPHA you would need a high clock xeon (3.6 ghz I believe was the number) at minimum to get on par with the emulation standards. Otherwise you would have a massive glitchfest.
Its now..... 10 or 12 years later? Maybe 8 - 10? So at THIS point, with an i7 4510U, would it be feasible to have maybe even a PS3 emulator on my laptop? PS2 emulator would be fine enough.
Emulating PS3 is going to be weird and I'm not sure it will happen. The cell processor or whatever it was called in PS3 is a weird bitch, so its going to make emulating a weird bitch aswell.
There IS a PS3 emulator, but it is in it's early stages. It's not even up to the loading bios software yet, let alone any games. Games just aren't doable at this point yet. But I hear the XboX 360 emulator is getting up there. And plays SOME games at low framerates. Emphasis on low framerates.
PCSX2 is basically the only viable emulator for PS2 and as of right now, it is compatible with most games.
The PS3 emulators are currently in development. The main one is RCPS3. It is going to take years and advances to CPU performance for a proper emulator to be made.
CPUs with high IPC and clock speed are key for playable emulation. You have a Haswell CPU. You shouldn't have much problems whatsoever.
System Requirements
Minimum (most games will be unplayable slow) Windows/Linux OS CPU: Any that supports SSE2 (Pentium 4 and up, Athlon64 and up) GPU: Any that supports Pixel Shader model 2.0, except Nvidia FX series (broken SM2.0, too slow anyway) 512MB RAM (note Vista needs at least 2GB to run reliably)
Recommended Windows Vista / Windows 7 (32bit or 64bit) with the latest DirectX CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo @ 3.2 GHz or better OR i3/i5/i7 @ 2,8 GHz or better OR AMD Phenom II @ 3,2 GHz or better GPU: 8800gt or better (for Direct3D10 support) RAM: 1GB on Linux/Windows XP, 2GB or more on Vista / Windows 7
While the PS3 Cell is more or less extremely well multithreaded 8 core cpu with very specific purpose for each core, PS2 is much more arcane technology. Ken Kutaragi was and still is a mad man. Genius, extremely intelligent and logically thinking man, but still a mad man. I believe there was parts of the game code of the PS2 games, that is literally 1 and 0 binary code, in order to execute properly the rest of the code. Kutaragi's logic was, that if you are market leader, people will make games for you. And if you make it extremely inconvenient and time consuming for them to make it, they will delay or skip the competition console ports, leaving your version of the game, the only one, available on the market. A way of thinking, that showed it's flaws in the early ps3 days, where the easier to develop for 360 had way more games, therefore more consoles sold... And the ps3 ports sucked... So what I was trying to imply is, that emulating the ps3 could be possible, though highly unlikely, the ps2 is pretty much alchemy and I don't really expect to see it become a reality in the near future. On top of that, I can go and get a working ps2 in a matter of days for cheaper than a AAA game release..
I still have a PSP and I still play my Wii :P the only wii game I would be willing to emulate is xenoblade to be honest. I just want to carry FF12 with me XD
@FaunCB I have done emulation with PS2 games, even went out and bought a used copy of FFXII for less than $10, and it runs flawlessly. So take that as you will, and if you do choose to chase after this goal, you should do a forum post so we can all see how it's going!
Awesome man! I do the same thing myself, and honestly, emulators are the best things in the world, playing my Gamecube games on the go is wonderful, and some of the PS2 games I've been able to find in the shop here in town is truly something!
Yeah, PCSX2 isn't without faults. There are some games that just don't render correctly for me.
In Burnout 3: Takedown, it won't render the sky and reflections correctly. It all appears pink instead of blue. Which sucks, because that was one of my all time favorite games.