Sure, but they used a PowerPC core with specialized SIMD processors that they then extensively documented:
https://arcb.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/SDK3.0/docs/a...
If they hadn't done the latter, it would probably have taken a lot longer to reverse engineer. It also would have made it near impossible for developers to code effectively for it, however.
A more realistic response would be: "computing hardware would not be powerful enough to emulate the PS3 in it's lifetime". We're now two decades out from it's release, and a decade out from it's final phase-out, so it seems that was a fair assessment.
1 - https://arcb.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/SDK3.0/docs/a...
The PS2 with its Emotion engine was a huge leap which was pretty hard to emulate for a while. And the PS3 was even harder. Yes the developers hated the Cell architecture, but overall, Sony managed to create a pretty good system which spawned incredible games, while also being so hard to emulate that it took over a decade to reach a point where it's done properly, and almost 20 years to reach a point where it's considered really fast.
Compare this to the Switch, which was being emulated pretty well from the get go. This allowed some people to just make do with an emulator instead of buying the console (and the games). Actually this goes for pretty much all Nintendo devices.
As a former PS2 developer I mostly thought "cool, VU's with more memory".
Few games really utilized the PS2 to it's fullest either (there's an port of GTA3 and GTA:VC to the older Dreamcast that's coming along very well).
The thing that really bit Sony here for the PS3 was that many PS2 titles (The PS2 GTA games being the prime example!) used the Renderware engine (a few others were available but it was the most popular afaik), so the complexity of the PS2 never really hit developers who were making games just below the absolute top tier.
When EA bought up Renderware slightly before the PS3 release, they closed off sales while honoring existing sales only so the most used cross platform engine was suddenly off limits to most third parties for the PS3 (Iirc is why Rockstar released that ping-pong game as an engine test before GTA4 and 5).
And the perceptions about third party engines also took a hit so not only was the most popular engine closed off, bigger developers were also became wary of relying on third party engines at all (during the PS3 period) until Unity later took off from indie usage.
Roughly 30 years later and N64 emulation is not fully solved.
Angrylion brought a new paradigm to n64 emulation, which is "fuck it, Low Level Emulation is fully doable now", and then that incredibly successful work was ported to run as a GPU shader, where it works a million times better! Now even medium powered devices, like the Steam Deck, can run low level emulation of n64 games at upscaled resolution and never run into graphics bugs, have fewer other bugs, have great performance, etc.
Classic bugs like the perfect dark remote camera that always had trouble on High Level Emulator plugins are just gone, no tweaks required. Games that wrote their own microcode run with no trouble. The crazy shit Rare and Factor 5 did at the end of the console's lifecycle just works in emulators.
https://www.libretro.com/index.php/category/parallel-n64/
Notably, Modern Vintage Gamer released a video titled "Why is Nintendo 64 emulation still a broken mess in 2025" and to make that video he had to contrive dumb scenarios: Running n64 emulation on the Playstation Vita and a Raspberry Pi.
Efficient and accurate high level emulation of the n64 is just not possible. You can't properly emulate the complex interactions going on in the n64 without huge amounts of overhead, it's too interconnected. Angrylion and Parallel-n64 proved, with that amount of overhead, you might as well do pixel accurate low level emulation and just eliminate an entire class of emulation bugs. When angrylion came out, around 2017, even a shitty laptop with a couple cores could run n64 games pixel accurate at native resolution and full speed.
In fact, on the Raspberry Pi that MVG is complaining about in the above mentioned video, he is complaining that "n64 emulation is a broken mess" because he is getting 50fps in conkers bad fur day. Because he is running it upscaled. He's complaining "n64 emulation is a broken mess" because the Raspberry Pi has a garbage GPU. Laptop integrated GPUs, even budget laptop integrated GPUs have no problems with parallel-n64
High level emulation was always a crutch, and never a good approach for n64 emulation. Even in it's heyday, it relied on per-game patches.
Notably, the Dolphin team ended up finding the same reality. What finally solved some serious emulator problems dealing with the gamecube having a mostly Fixed Function Pipeline graphics system that could be updated whenever, a situation that does not translate at all to computer graphics systems that expect you have individual shader programs to call with certain materials, was to write a giant shader that literally emulated the entire gamecube graphics hardware and use that while you wait for the emulated shader to compile. Ubershaders they call it.
We have multicore machines with far more cores today so we can match the computation unit count and performance.
The other part was that older consoles (8 and 16 bit era) really needed a lot of cycle-exact emulation to not fail and that requires an order of magnitude faster CPU's to manage emulating it properly and with CPU's hitting the Ghz limits around the same time we thought it'd be impossible to do that level of cycle-exactness needed.
Luckily though, because the PS3 needed optimal multi-core programming and the way to achieve the maximum throughput for that was to use DMA channels to shuffle data between CPU/SPU parts, emulator authors can probably use them as choke-points to handle emulation on a slightly more high level and avoid trying to manage cycle-exact timings.
Most of these, as a big exception, do not apply to the Cell running code on data in its local memory, but fortunately, it's different as seen from other system components, as you say.
seam_carver•8mo ago
snvzz•8mo ago