• videogame [he/him]
    ·
    2 months ago

    finally we can experience what it would be like to play bloodborne on the virtual boy

    • silent_water [she/her]
      ·
      2 months ago

      ps4 might be easier because it's pretty close to commodity hardware. there's much less actual emulation that needs to happen. ps3 was weird and bespoke.

      • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        2 months ago

        Yeah ps3 is a resource hog when it comes to emulation but I still doubt my dinky little laptop with an i5 is up to emulating the ps4. I have trouble running 3ds emulation as it is.

        • silent_water [she/her]
          ·
          2 months ago

          I meant that it doesn't actually have to emulate much. it just runs the game as if it were native, more similar to how wine works than old school emulators. with the older consoles, it has to translate the instructions from the original code into instructions for the PC hardware and insert software approximations of stuff the hardware does on the physical consoles. this invariably makes what used to take just a few instructions take multiple hundreds of clock cycles or worse.

          but on the ps4, it's just a "fancy", underpowered desktop pc. (fancy, as in, they talked Intel/AMD into providing a custom version of their normal cpu/gpu that could run within the power/thermal budgets of the ps4 -- so it runs slower than it would if you built the computer yourself.) it's not easy to get the games themselves running as a developer for the emulator -- you have to teach your computer how to read the executables and interpret them + provide system library equivalents, but you don't have to fake entire pieces of hardware that don't exist.

          the ps5 is even further down this path... it's just a low tier desktop PC running a custom OS built on top of one of the BSD's (iirc). it's why the ps5 -> PC ports come out so much faster than previous gens -- don't have to do all that much as a developer to get it working on PC. I'm honestly surprised we don't have a functional "emulator" for it already.

          • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]
            ·
            2 months ago

            Hm, I didn't know that about the PS4/5 that they are just like weaker PCs. I thought they still had weird programming like the PS3

            • silent_water [she/her]
              ·
              2 months ago

              it made more sense when custom hardware for games could deliver more consistent results than what was possible from PCs. but that stopped being true in the 2010s so they just started buying the parts from the usual vendors. that's also one of the reasons consoles got so much more expensive -- they're literally just PCs now and cost at least as much as.

              • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]
                ·
                2 months ago

                Yeah I've noticed that, that console are now PC price. Which is why I'd rather just stick with PC but the steam deck looks pretty cool.

                • silent_water [she/her]
                  ·
                  2 months ago

                  I want one too but I play so few games that I think it's just pursuit-of-shiny-toy. if it weren't linux, I'd already have talked myself out of it. but more linux games means I might actually play something other than Disco Elysium for the Nth time.

                  • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]
                    ·
                    2 months ago

                    Yeah I kind of want one as a shiny toy too. I was chatting with someone who plays Final Fantasy XI on it via a private server and I thought it was such a cool idea. But it's honestly nothing I can't already do on PC.

                    • silent_water [she/her]
                      ·
                      2 months ago

                      isn't that an MMO? trying to imagine playing WoW on a steam deck and losing my mind lmao

                      • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]
                        ·
                        2 months ago

                        Yup it is lol. Wow might not work the same, but FFXI was originally on console and has console like controls. It's actually easier to play it with a pad than m&k.

                        • silent_water [she/her]
                          ·
                          2 months ago

                          ohh interesting. that makes more sense than WoW where even a keyboard doesn't have enough buttons.

                          • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]
                            ·
                            2 months ago

                            Yeah XI also had a neat system where the game would auto translate between Japanese and English since the servers were merged between JP and USA so you could use a soft keyboard and type in keywords like "combat" or "magic" and it would auto complete and translate, to make up for the lack of a keyboard a lot of ps2 users faced.

  • machinya [it/its, fae/faer]
    ·
    2 months ago

    yay, the only ps4 game I ever had interest in will be playable without having to buy a sony console, nice