TheScottishMexican42 said:
My friend who I can only describe as a 'PC elitist' is claiming that any game on a console, that includes exclusives on the Xbox 360 and PS3, can be played on a PC. He claims that it's as simple as putting the game in and messing with some software. This is his arguments against consoles, which he claims as "scum".
Is he talking crap, or is there some kind of truth?
No, he is 100% right. Any video game available in the market can be played on a decently build gaming PC right now. There is actually proof that even the Xbox One video games were ran on win 7, the only question is if it was on custom drivers or not as you can see here:
- http://www.vg247.com/forum/topic.php?id=16181
- http://wololo.net/2013/06/17/xbox-ones-e3-demos-werent-run-on-the-xbox-one-or-were-they/
Now here's the thing, he is right, totally, however it doesn't mean he can run them. Because the console companies, though they could release an emulator or a devkit to run their games in PCs, won't do it.
What he is saying is akin to "Any guy with basic chemical education can mix the ingredients to duplicate perfectly a Coca Cola"... ignoring the fact that the difficult thing is not mixing but knowing them. So, it is as simple as "putting the game in and messing with some software", as long as you are a computer science god, software architect maestro and a retro engineering genius, have the console and time to work on it.
What he can do however with current public emulation is run up to the PS2 era games pretty much flawlessly.
PD. It is interesting how many people here seem to think there's a technical impossibility with this task, when it's mostly just a reverse engineer and optimization problem, though a very complex one.