To be honest, i think $3k per month is already pretty generous, considering the amount of work the lead dev does. I followed the project closely couple of years ago and even back then it obvious for anyone who studied the codebase, that nekotekina lost all enthusiasm about the project a long time ago.
They should consider switching to per-task payment model, so maybe some other talented people can participate, because nowadays devs supported by that patreon page do just enough work to put at least something in the monthly changelog.
kd-11 was fine, the criticisms is mostly directed at "the main dev" nekotekina. Go through the git history of the last 4~ years. It's not amazing or impressive by any stretch of the imagination.
hmm, the Patreon claims ($4k/m) is to support both of those developers "full-time". I have to agree the commit history (for both) seems a bit thin. Although not to the point it's alarming or anything, as work is being done. I'm also well aware that's not always the best measure of contributions to software. Especially given the high-quality work going into documentation on this blog...
A fair bit of this would be testing, reverse engineering, etc.
If you look at the commit history of any of the devs where I work, it'd look a bit thin too, but we're all working 8+ hours / day.
Once an emulator gets fairly polished, it's not unusual to spend a week or two on a bug to discover you need to add one bitwise and to mask a couple of bits out of a value somewhere.
Good to hear that emulation development is still alive and well, for so many reasons. As consoles became more locked-down emulation seemed to stall, what with the unusually long generational span of the 360/ps3 era. Someday it will be outrageously expensive to find a working ps3 or Xbox 360, and when that day comes emulation will be the only way to enjoy the titles from your childhood, especially for non-blockbuster titles with little chance of remakes. Scanning preserves our photographic history, digitalization preserves our film history, and emulation is how we preserve our gaming history.
Microsoft's proprietary emulator for Xbox 360 provides access to 551 out of 2100 released games on the Xbox One. One of the main reasons I bought one (pretty amazing I can LAN party Halo Reach between my 360/One X).
I can't see any reason they wouldn't keep improving the emulator and bringing it to their next consoles (which are very likely to be AMD machines and thus have near native backwards compatibility with Xbox One).
> threads relating to RSX, SPU and PPU have higher priority, audio threads are delayed during bottlenecks leading to crackling or complete loss of sound
This is an interesting choice, given that almost everywhere else it seems like audio is given the high priority to prevent stutters like these.
As an aside, the font size is a bit small on my iPad (nothing Reader mode couldn’t fix, though).
Sony doesn't seem to care about emulation of old systems. The reality is that old games doesn't bring in much money for them and the people who run emulators are a niche.
TL;DR emulators are legal, as long as you use game files you have legally acquired by buying the game and dumping it yourself. Using game files from online is illegal.
It can be fine as well if it can legally be downloaded. For example, it's possible to get the official firmware directly from Sony or play some homebrew software.
And I'm sure it's possible to find some game demos as well.
Not even. There was an emulator for the Wii U while the console was still seeing new releases, and no "chasing" happened. Similarly, there are at least 2 Switch emulators in development, and I haven't heard of any legal trouble from their side. Same for the 3DS, etc.
I think the distinction to make here is that in the case of RPCS3 it's more like creating a projector in software than recreating a film in software.
I can tell you that it is explicitly illegal to have the files you load into the emulator to play a certain game if you haven't purchased a copy of that game yourself.
What you or the video player is doing is not in itself illegal. The "illegal" part, if you want to use that terminology, is the purchasing and/or possession of an illegal copy of copyrighted material. The fact of copyright infringement doesn't magically emerge through the process of playing it.
There are not—as far as I'm aware—any laws against watching copyright infringing materials; intentional possession is the entirety of crime.
No. Copyright is about making a copy. It’s literally in the name: right to copy. A file downloaded illegally means someone made a copy without being authorized by the IP holder.
There are 'performance rights' that are separate from the direct copyright infringement. i.e. if you buy a DVD legally and show it to your church's youth group, you'll be infringing on the performance rights. AFAIAA there isn't an 'enhanced' punishment if you got the IP illegally, just two separate offenses.
> sys_overlay, a special way for games to load external code. While it is very much a work in progress, it shows real promise because Metal Gear Solid 4 needs it to run
Can we please not have news about software that supports piracy and disrespects authors' rights on the front page? Why isn't this banned outright?
I wonder how Stallman would feel if Apple were to take GCC's source, add support for e.g. Swift and keep it closed source while violating the GPL and then post blog posts about what great engineers they are.
We also have posts about hackers and all sorts of shit. It's here because it's technically interesting.
Projects like this are also critical - tons of media running on proprietary hardware/software will be lost without projects like this. Think about DOSBox, or even just Flashplayer games, or how rare an n64 is. All of the art produced on these platforms will be lost unless we build software to run it.
Emulators are also, generally, ~5-10 years behind the consoles. At that point the consoles themselves are likely deprecated in favor of the next platform. PS3 has been out for 13 years. Do you really believe this code will negatively impact sales of games, when it's usable nearly 2 decades after release?
*edit
And a side note - I believe PCSX2 was the first program I ever compiled, as a teenager. It was at least some part of what interested me in computers - I wanted to know why some games were slow or fast, or what role the GPU played. Emulators are some of the coolest projects out there, I think, and posts about their implementation seem very fitting for HN.
They're no longer manufactured, and therefor the numbers are only decreasing. A quick look at amazon prices one at ~100 dollars. What do you think that'll be in a decade?
Certainly some games are already quite pricey as there are fewer and fewer copies out there (check out prices for SSBM).
Emulation has been legal in the US since the Sony vs. Bleem! case was decided. As long as they do a clean room reconstruction of the hardware's functionalities it remains legal.
What you are aruging is essentially that clang is guilty for not using GPL because it also compiles code written for gcc. This is not how things work in OSS.
That's a poor analogy. It's an understandable mistake to make if you're not familiar with emulator development, but (most) emulators do not rely on stolen source code or other stolen proprietary secrets. They reverse engineer these secrets instead, which is completely legal (and, imo, morally and ethically valid.)
I don't know what Stallman's view on video game emulators is, but I'd expect he'd be opposed to them, like how I'd expect he'd be opposed to the original game consoles because they enable the use of proprietary software, since almost all commercial video games are proprietary. However, Stallman is normally in favour of reverse engineering proprietary systems to allow interoperability with free systems, even when that runs the risk of enabling piracy: just see DeCSS/libdvdcss.
It's fascinating to see comments like this, indicating that the rights owners groups propaganda has been so effective in some segment of the population, that they actively advocate against their own interests and rights.
Copyright holders (not synonymous with the authors, btw) don't actually have a right to be the sole distributors of a product for all of eternity. The law says they do, but it's a dumb law, and you don't have any moral obligation to follow dumb laws.
But the authors of this emulator don't even support unauthorized downloading, as far as I know. You can easily play legally obtained games on RPCS3 by ripping them with an ordinary Blu-ray drive.
I recommend the Dolphin emulator blog as well. The last one: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2019/02/01/dolphin-progress-rep...
I remember vaguely something about them using a visual difference tool as a regression test, really cool!