Filed under: Gaming, Rumors, Odds and ends
Mac Gaming: Xbox 360 and PS3 Emulators?
This is total conjecture; however, has any one else out there noticed that both the XBox 360 and the PS3 are running on G5 / PowerPC based* chips? There is also already speculation about Xbox 360 compatibility with the iPod and I think I read similar reports about the PS3, although I cannot now find the link.So, the question is: with these similarities in architecture, could we see some nice hacks that squeeze OS X onto these two gaming boxes, or better yet, could we see some PS3 and Xbox 360 emulators for OS X coming out down the road? Discuss.
*added for clarification of my rantings.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Michael May said 4:18PM on 6-16-2005
If emulators were made, they would be painfully slow except on massively powerful G5's: 2x 2.7GHz G5 running an OS at the same time as a game vs 3.2GHz G5 solely devoted to games for the Xbox 360 emulator would probably be playable, but vs. a cell processor? I don't think so.
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janeiro said 4:18PM on 6-16-2005
neither the Xbox, Playstation, or Revolution are using G5s, they're using PowerPC processors. There is a difference. The Xbox has lots of its guts ripped out, the playstation and revolution processors are custom for those boxes. it's not like the original xbox which ran a bone stock celeron.
in the 360 case, it seems like the processor is a subset of the PowerPC processor, so it might be possible not to emulate, but virtualize. the code may be able to run without the need for emulation, but supporting libraries would be necessary, kind of like Wine in Linux. Wine Is Not an Emulator, it's a compatibility layer. There's no need to emulate.
i don't know much about the revolution, but it might be the same way.
until other stuff starts using cell processor technology, there probably won't be much that can emulate it at an appreciable speed.
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Blair Robinson said 4:18PM on 6-16-2005
Emulation probably not, but we could see more Mac gaming. The games wont just run on a G5, but since they're are being programmed to run a a PowerPC processor and and basicly nextgen ATI/Nvidia GPU's, the work to port a game that is coming out for these systems to Mac could be substantially less, and encourage a growing Mac gaming market.
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Bagel said 4:18PM on 6-16-2005
I don't know about Mac gaming because I think the game coders still code on specific APIs (are they still using Win32 and DirectX APIs on XBox 360 the way they did with the original XBox?). Perhaps it would be easier to port to the Mac this way. But perhaps we might see a PowerPC windows again in the future? Development for XBox 360 is being done on PowerMac G5s right now.
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Cris Rose said 1:28PM on 9-29-2005
I'd rather go the other way around, and run Tiger on a 360 or PS3 as they are both more powerful that the top of the range G5s at the moment, and will hopefully cost only a bit more than a Mac Mini.
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Andrew Turner said 8:14AM on 7-14-2005
What seems to be the most exciting result of using the PowerPC architecture for these chips will be the 'aside-advertising' for Apple.
I've heard kids and people (both non-tech/geek) remark, "Have you seen the new XBox? it's running apple's hardware! That's awesome!"
So, more respect amongst the general population for Apple products by some (albeit skewed) assodciation. ;)
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teksno said 4:18PM on 6-16-2005
hey ck....ask you cohuarts over at engadget about the cpu's for the ps3, and the 360....
sorry bro...you are simply wrong this time....
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Chris Mcdowell said 4:18PM on 6-16-2005
I belive that the PS3 runs OpenGL and not direct X like the xbox. It is using a power pc chip and should be easy peasy to port games over from the ps3 to mac. Right?
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Paul said 4:18PM on 6-16-2005
WHAT!!! how did you make a post out of one of my comments!!!! your a sly one C.K.
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C.K. Sample, III said 4:18PM on 6-16-2005
teksno, the Xbox games' development platform is G5 based. The chip in the PS3 is PowerPC based. Read your fellow commentors.
Sorry, headache. Original post was overly harsh.
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The Jeremy said 4:18PM on 6-16-2005
It is completely possible to port the games to the Mac platform, but standard Macs will have to get better hardware. For example, the best way to do this would be to include a Cell processor (as a co-processor) into standard Mac hardware to complement the G5. There could be other outstanding benefits to this, such as HDTV encoding/decoding if you wanted to use a Mac mini (with such processors) as a DVR. Next, the Mac platform needs better videocards, which GPUs at similar levels as the Xbox360 and the PS3. Obviously, it would be easiest to port the PS3 games to such a Mac platform since the PS3 is using OpenGL and not DirectX.
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Chris Mcdowell said 4:18PM on 6-16-2005
ps3 looks nicer also and shows that open GL is just as capable if not better than Direct 3D. By the time the ps3 comes out I think the mac and pc's will see quite a leap in processor specs and video cards will be available better or equal to what the ps3 has currently.
Think of how happy IBM is about all of this they get money from PS3 sales, Xbox 360 Sales and Reveloution sales as well as PowerMacs and iMacs. I wonder how the supply will be with IBM delivering all the chips to so many companies. They have trouble getting chips to Apple I hear. Better now but still.
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Stephen Waits said 11:12AM on 10-26-2005
no.
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Chris K said 4:18PM on 6-16-2005
Yeah, it's not gonna happen, not without much more powerful Macs. Just look at this anecdote:
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/615/615667p1.html
That's a G5 choking to provide the performance from a triple-core XBox 360.
If Sony lives up to their hype (they never have, of course) the PS3 would be even more difficult.
For a frame of reference, the P3 CPU inside the original XBox is barely powerful enough to emulate a N64 or PS1, and not powerful enough to emulate a Dreamcast. While using the same CPU makes things much easier, you still have to emulate all of the other hardware, AND duplicate any kind of embedded software and firmware, which would likely cross some kind of legal line.
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ryan bean said 4:18PM on 6-16-2005
What I want to know is why hasn't anyone created a word prosessor for any system we have now, or future one. surely ps3, xbox360, or ps2 and xbox could handle word.
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jammers said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
Some very interesting points raised here. Like someone said above, what I would really love to see is OS X on PS3 (screw you XBox fanboys!). The PS3's CPU may be POWER-derived (not exactly PowerPC...which is another flavor of the POWER family), but that doesn't mean much because the POWER part of the CPU just acts as a "controller" module to the 8 "cores" or APUs, which do the actual number flipping. Incidentally, only 7 of the 8 do useful work; the last is reserved as a redundancy. Whoever wants to write an emulator/virtualization layer for the PS3 CPU would have to know that architecture pretty well, and it's a new architecture, I might add.
I guess it's a bit more feasible with XBox's triple-core PowerPC chip.
Anyway, I hope someone makes it.... I want to get my hands on OS X but I just can't justify spending the extra $$ for an entire hardware setup (which, I think, is overpriced to begin with!)
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