April 8, 2009by Chris

It is a rare thing indeed when a current-generation machine can be emulated. There is no chance at emulating the PS3 or the 360 right now but the Wii is another story. The Nintendo Wii emulation scene is strong and active at this very moment.

Meet Dolphin: an open source emulator originally by F|RES & ector available for Windows, Linux, and OS X. Dolphin code is found at code.google.com and the Dolphin Webpage is found at http://www.dolphin-emu.com. Dolphin is written in Cplusplus (sry my parser eats plus signs at the moment) and can be compiled in Visual Studio 2008 and GCC under Linux and OS X. The project is open to contribution, to find out more, visit code.google.com/p/dolphin-emu

Currently, the project is going through much refinement with bi-weekly builds which is discussed in this thread at the dolphin forum

Excerpt from the FAQ: Dolphin reads ISO or GMC files. You can dump your Wii games to your PC using instructions found with google.

So far, there are several Wii games that are playabl with varying degrees of functionality: Animal Crossing, Cocoto Kark, MarioKart, Wii Music, Wii Sports Pack, Wii Play Party Pack. Mario Galaxy, Super Smash Bros, and Metroid are also looking good. Dolphin has a much richer compatibility list for the Game Cube, naturally.

A decent system is required for this emulator - a fast CPU with SSE2, dual core or faster recommended, any modern GPU with pixel shader 2.0 compatibility, Windows XP, Linux, or OS X.

Regarding GameCube emulation, Dophin does a reasonable job - many games are supported and many don't work at all. Sadly, games such as Zelda, Mario Sunshine, and Pikmin do not have sound.

So this is a great day for Wii Emulation - the Dolphin Emulator is the future and with new builds coming out every week, it won't be decades before we can play Mario Galaxy on our PC.

MaxEm 9.4

February 10, 2009by Chris

If you want to play Xbox 360 Games on your PC then bookmark this page and come back in 10 years.

Right now there are no Xbox 360 emulators available and nobody is working on one.

Home technology is still way too slow to handle the three core 'slightly modified cell processor architecture' IBM Xenon microprocessor and the R600-based ATI GPU - the left and right brain of the 360.

Yes, home technology is several times faster than the legacy 2005 tech of the 360, it's just that home tech needs to be exponentially faster to handle the brute force of reproducing a decent 30fps of emulated Xbox 360 games. That, plus the necessary brains to figure out exactly how to reproduce the execution of 360 games - Microsoft doesn't make it easy, it's not like the days of emulating the Atari 2600. So will we ever see an Xbox 360 emulator? Hopefully, all things are possible in the technology world.

Don't be fooled into downloading and executing an 'Xbox 360 Emulator' as it will likely be a trojan and will mess up your life. As reported in Q4 of 2008 - Xeon 360 is a trojan!

Xbox 360 Homebrew

On the flip side of things, just because you can't emulate the Xbox 360 doesn't mean that you can't run emulators on the 360. Right now, the only emulator available is NESCAFE - NES emulator for your Xbox.

There have been rumours of someone porting MAME to the 360 but nothing concrete has surfaced other than this suspect video on YouTube.

MAME has been successfully ported to the original Xbox - see MAMEoX. Emulation of the original Xbox is hardly off the ground with only two emulators that only play one game each - ie CxBx which plays Turok Evolution.

At the moment, there are about 30 Xbox 360 projects at SourceForge.net - ranging from Xbox 360 Keyboard support to HD video, even an X86 emulation project.

The 360 has sold more units in Canada than it has in Japan but it is selling strong - 28 million units sold worldwide (February 2009). By the end of its product life cycle, the Xbox 360 will have left a huge impact with many people on the planet. Probably enough to motivate one of currently young 360 fanatics to figure out how to emulate it a decade or two from now, passing up keg parties at college to reproduce his or her beloved console with the latest quantum processor technology.. Good luck kid, more power to you.

Right now, nothing emulates the Xbox 360 and emulators on the homebrew front are surprisingly scarce with only the NES being faithfully emulated. There are more emulators currently available for the iPhone.

MaxEm is always curious about any word on Genesis, MAME, 8bit, PSX, PS2, emulation - so if you have anything to say, leave a comment for everyone. What will the Internet be like 20 years from now? Think Xbox Live will still be around...for free?

CS 2.9

March 3, 2009by Chris

PS3 Emulator
Can I emulate the PS3 on the iPhone? Can I play PS3 Games on my 360? How about in Windows or in OS X? Can I play Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo games on my PS3?

All good questions and the answers are no, no, no, no, yes, and yes.

The Playstation 3 is much too powerful at the moment to be emulated by home technology. If you want to play PS3 games on another system then fire up your time machine and download the PS3 emulator from the year 2029 or, more likely, 2039 because there are no PS3 emulators available in 2009 and nothing will emulate the PS3 apart from a cloud or a stack of PS3's running Linux (which makes little sense).

Emulators on the PS3
You can run all kinds of emulators on the PS3 through Linux - the best method for emulation on the PS3.

If you don't want to go the Linux route then you can faithfully emulate the SNES/Super Famicom, and Genesis/Mega Drive, with the XMB and a memory stick.

For the retail route, Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection can be purchased at amazon or elsewhere. You get 40 "resolution enhanced" original Genesis games for your PS3 (including 6 Sonic Games, 3 Golden Axe, and 1 Shinobi III).

It looks like PS3 is catching up to the 360. Worldwide sales (March 3/2009) of the PS3 are pegged at 20.71 million and the Xbox 360 is around 28.82 million, according to VG Chartz.com.

This means that there are tens of millions of enthusiasts for both consoles -- more or less guaranteeing that we will have a PS3 emulator within the next hundred years!

For now, your best bet it to help the economy and drop some cash on a spanky new PS3.

CS 9.3