XBox 360 Emulator Scene Q4 2008 by Chris October 27, 2008 

Right now (Oct. 2008) there are no real Xbox 360 emulators out there because our home technology is way too slow (save for a stack of daisy chained Playstation 3's running Linux with strange emulation software downloaded from the year 2030).

An XBox 360 emulator will not be available for many years - perhaps decades.

It will be a challenge (but not an impossibility) to duplicate the brute power of the three core PowerPC IBM-engineered brain of the 360 plus the utilization of it.

Microsoft has made it difficult to emulate the 360 with an intricate security system and a custom version of Direct X but with enough time, you probably will be playing emulated XBox 360 games on some sort of futuristic pad or system before you're old and gray.

Beware of torrents or other nefarious downloads claiming to be XBox 360 emulators - these are surely trojans that will destroy your system and burn down your house. (Xeon360 is a trojan!)

So nothing will emulate the 360 but what can the 360 emulate? Right now: the NES.

The original Nintendo has successfully been emulated in the 360 and there talk of a Genesis emulator. The Microsoft XNA developer kit has been used to emulate Space Invaders (and the NES too but it runs at about 60% of normal speed).

Does the 360 play original Xbox games? Yes it does. Microsoft has engineered a software emulator to do just that. See the backwards compatibility tab for further info.

At the moment, you'd need a super computer to emulate the XBox 360, no emulator projects are currently under way and it is anyone's guess when a real 360 emulator will come out. Anything that is currently circulating the 'net at this moment pretending to be an 360 emulator is surely a virus or a trojan.

Want to play XBox 360 games right now? Buy a 360.

CS 10-8

Playstation 3 Emulation Scene by Chris October 27, 2008 

THE SONY PLAYSTATION 3 IS A MONSTER of a machine - emulation of the PS3 does not currently exist and no PS3 emulators are currently in development (October 2008).

There has been some talk on the web about an available PS3 emulator for the iPhone and iPod touch - play PS3 games on your iPhone! If you believe that then you need to read up on the awesome mind-bending architecture of the IBM-designed 8-cell ("synergistic processing elements") microprocessor. (not a chance in hell will this machine will be emulated anytime soon).

If someone actually did dump and cobble together some executable PS3 emulator code for the i-gadgets, emulation would either melt the device into a blob of shiny glassy-metallic-plastic or deliver one frame an hour.

It is doubtful that this machine will ever be emulated due to the complexity of its brain(s) plus the challenge of figuring out exactly how the machine actually runs the games.

But you never know, nerds love a challenge and I'm betting that this machine will be successfully emulated - within the next 3 decades. So we'll see. I for one, am not going to have stroke trying to figure out how to emulate the PS3.

So what good is that! Yes, it is tough that there are no PS3 emulators and it also blows that we will have to wait half a life-time to get one but don't despair - there is a flip-side to this: instead of emulating the PS3, you can run emulators on the PS3. Okay, maybe not what you were expecting but hey, now the PS3 is way cooler than it was a minute ago.

The PS3 can run Linux. Linux can run emulators. Therefor, you can run a bunch of Linux emulators on the PS3 (theoretically). If you don't want to run Linux on your PS3 then, for now, you can run the home-brewed NES emulator in your PS3 without any modifications.

Finally, what about backwards compatibility? I want to run my PS2 games on my PS3! For this, there is some good news and, unfortunately, a lot of bad news.

More info about the 'PS3 NES emulator' and 'PS3 backwards PS2 compatibility' is available under their associated tabs.

The PS3 is a beautiful machine inside and out (especially inside) and a technological work of magnificent art. Hands down to Sony for its creation. Easily the best video game console ever created, of course.

Emulation of the PS3 does not currently exist (especially on the iphone!), however, emulators for the PS3 are popping up throughout the community and maybe one day, far off into the future, we'll be playing PS3 games on a handset or on some high definition holographic display. Stay tuned!

CS 2008

Nintendo DS Emulator Scene by Chris October 27, 2008 

The Nintendo DS is the second most successful handheld gaming system of all time with over 77 million units sold (June 2008). Nintendo's Gameboy is still the reining champ with 116 units sold worldwide.

With the DS selling close to three quarters of a million units per month and the new version coming out, this system is no where near the end of its product life cycle.

So that makes it a problem for the emulator world - there are still many millions of dollars to be made for Nintendo and so emulation of the DS is an iffy art at best.

There have already been some causalities - the coder of the popular DeSmuME emulator had to terminate development out of legal concerns with Nintendo. And that is to be expected.

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Currently, the best Nintendo DS emulator out there is iDeaS by Lino (second place goes to DeSmuME).

Both of these emulators faithfully emulate some DS games - each emulator's home page contains a list of compatible games - highly recommended reading to help save you time and effort.

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Apart from emulating the DS on your PC, Mac, or Linux, you can run emulators on the DS - an Apple II emulator is available and you can even run Linux on your DS. How cool is that?

CS 10-8