Console to PC Emulation

[antipunt]

PS2 emulation is coming along quite well, although there are a hell of a lot of games that wont work with it yet, or are incredibly buggy if they actually load.

God of war 2 is one game that has major graphical problems once you get in game, although the FMVs work fine, the sound also has a strange 'echo' to it as well.

You do need a fairly fast processor to get the games on there to run at more than a crawl due to all the work being forced onto it and you graphics card sitting there doing nothing.

Long story short IMO Is that emulation has reached kinda a plateau in terms of progress. Seeing that the ps2 emulator is still so heavily in its 'experimental stages', and that its been so freaking long, we can kiss goodbye any prospects for emulators for next-gen (unless your next-gen is referring to the gamecube or original xbox =P)

 

[Powerhelix]

I dont know if anyone mentioned this, but the creation of an emulator is... well... illegal... it is breaking into coding that is pattented and redistributing it amongst the population... Even if I, say, had a 360 emulator I couldn't sell it or go public with it because I would lose EVERYTHING and more... So I'm sure there are people with emulators out there but they wont share lol

 

[antipunt]

I dont know if anyone mentioned this, but the creation of an emulator is... well... illegal... it is breaking into coding that is pattented and redistributing it amongst the population... Even if I, say, had a 360 emulator I couldn't sell it or go public with it because I would lose EVERYTHING and more... So I'm sure there are people with emulators out there but they wont share lol

you sound so 'sure' of yourself [rolls eyes]. Read some previous posts in the thread, an emulator is NOT illegal. I repeat. =P

 

[xenus87]

Encryption and Legal protections:
As has been mentioned, most consoles have their main firmwares and operating software protected by technical and legal means. You can emulate the hardware all you want, but the second you start touching proprietary, protected firmwares and code... You just opened up a "Can 'o' Gray Zone". The laws regarding reverse engineering proprietary software are at best contradictory to each other. And as usual in most court systems, the one with the most money usually wins.

"EMUNAME does however require a real PS2 BIOS to run. However, you must obtain this from your own PS2, as the BIOS binary is copyrighted by SONY and cannot be distributed with EMUNAME as this would be highly illegal. This is perhaps the only technical thing you will have to do to get EMUNAME running games, but there are guides and tools out there to help you do this.

Taken from the readme of the PS2 emulator.

Dumping your own set of BIOS from your own console is rather easy, and these emulator programmers know that, so any requests on their forums for posting up BIOS sets, or actually posting links to them anywhere on the internet is rewarded with an instant ban, and have been know to report people to authorities in the past for distributing them on their personal web spaces.

"Whilst EMUNAME is capable of playing 'backups', it is not the intention of the authors to provide a means to play illegaly copied games. It is however the intention of the authors to let you play (once hardware is capable) PS2 games on your PC's, with the enhancements emulation allows, such as save-states, high resolution graphics, infinte memory cards, cross-region support etc."

In a way, you can understand why they want to do it, as a hobby, pure technical challenge, or to just improve on the gaming 'experience', but due to how easy it is to get hold of 'backups' of games on the internet these days, it no wonder the console companies keep a close watch on the projects to make sure none of their code is being distributed illegally with the emulator.

Another good thing about this emulator, is that it is completely open source, and there are plenty of tools out there to decompile the files to check what is actually in there in case you don't trust them.