Since the PS3 ran on modified OpenBSD, would it be possible to run physical disc games trough a disc drive on a Linux laptop by downloading the needed libraries? In what way would I need to modify the games/system?
Would the architecture play a big role? My thinkpad barely runs RPCS3 but can handle AAA steam titles.
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No, you couldn’t because the PS3 has a very different architecture compared to most PCs. That’s what projects like RPCS3 have struggled since the beginning.
I remember reading back then an interview with a developer complaining about how difficult it was to make the port to ps3 for that reason.
Gabe Newell famously participated in an interview about the same subject when porting The Orange Box, and as a result handed the port off to EA (which ended up running like dogshit compared to all other platforms).
This is not apples to apples whatsoever. Following this logic I can run ARM programs natively on x86 hardware thanks to android using the Linux kernel in its development.
You will need a compatibility layer regardless for different hardware architectures from your own. This includes the PS3’s CELL based hardware (which is why RPCS3 needs so much power to emulate the system at good speeds). Now if you ran Linux on your PS3, there is a possibility to do this (but then you’d have to emulate x86 games on your PS3).
It’s a little better with ARM to x86 since we have fast user mode emulators now such as FEX. Of course it’s not really “native” but good enough for the Steam Frame for example.
Of course, and I’m not knocking the FEX project. I’m just pointing out that there is no native solution to running programs built for other hardware architectures (other than a port adapted from source).
The PS3’s CELL is just so egregiously unique that it has a massive emulation overhead compared to ARM or any other more common/simple hardware architecture - less understood overall, and less understood in how it can be translated to x86 compared to ARM->x86.
even if you grabbed all the code available on a ps3, there is no way in hell to make a x86_64 machine run a program compiled for a powerpc cpu except by emulation or just-in-time-recompilation… good luck
And I cannot recompile the games because they’re coded for this exact architecture and there’d be many losses, right?
In theory you can recompile by translating the instructions, the problem is the game engine assumes things about the hardware that is no longer true when running on your computer, such as memory model and more. Patching this up makes it slow.
give it a couple decades of manpower and eventually it will become viable
might actually come true at some point, like what happened with n64 games
The architecture is certainly a big issue.
Nothing else really maps 1:1 to the PS3 CPU. The main overhead is not from translating the libraries. It’s emualting the CPU/recompiling the code.
There would likely be no efficiency gain from running the games on software that more closely matches the PS3 OS.
It’d be like the difference of using windows instead of proton to run games. Not always better. Sometimes worse.
PS3 was a modified OpenBSD?
Excuse me what?
afaik it was freebsd?
