RPCS3 Forums

I just want to start by thanking all the developers here for their hard work and dedication to something that is a free contribution to the community.  I have always felt that video games are as much an art form as anything else, and therefore deserve to be preserved beyond a temporary shelf life of a piece of hardware that becomes obsolete and unsupported after just a few years.  That's why I believe emulation to be truly important in the preservation of art.  And yes, video games are art.  They may not be all Van Gogh masterpieces that are priceless treasures but they are important nonetheless.  I truly feel that they can have last appeal, even as the decades pass on.

Having said that, and having perused your well put together website, which is excellent in itself I might add, I confess to have noticed something that concerns me.  It seems to me that the development on the games list seems to be a focus on a general quantity of games. Getting the most games higher on your list as possible.  This seems to be a noble goal.  Having a emulator to preserve all games sounds like a great thing.  However, to me, this philosophy seems like a mistake.  If the goal of emulation is to preserve games as an art form, and I believe it should be, I think this premise is flawed.  The fact is, not all Playstation 3 games NEED to be preserved, for the simple fact that many Playstation 3 games are playable on other mediums.  Is it really a beneficial use of a developers time to get Dead Space 3 or FIFA 14 working on their PC PS3 emulator, when they are already available on steam?  

I might be off base here, as I haven't exactly thoroughly examined every single game on your compatibility list.  However I believe the focus on RPCS3 should be first and foremost on the games that truly need preserving.  The Until Dawns.  The Killzone 3s.  The Metal Gear Solid 4s.  The Playstation 3 exclusives.  These are games that may disappear forever in a decade if not for this very emulator.  I understand that every game is probably its own separate nightmare of a process and maybe the awnser is simply that those Playstation exclusives are simply more difficult to get running than the yearly soccer games.  Even so, I believe time would be well spent on the preservation of games that truly need it.

Thank you for all you great work!

We're preserving the console, not the specific games. Work on preserving the PS3 game library is being done by projects like Redump and No-Intro, and the vast majority of the library is already preserved. Blu-Rays also last a lot longer than CDs and DVDs so there is still a lot of time to preserve what's left as far as physical games go. As long as the games are preserved, it doesn't matter how much time an emulator takes to get to a state that can play it, because it's already successfully preserved so it's only a matter of time.

Furthermore, general improvements will eventually make these AAA games work. These games already have special attention anyways because they have the most people testing them and making bug reports on top of them. You can't expect an emulator in Alpha to just be running the most demanding games of the platform. If you have an emulator that runs all the demanding exclusive games but not the vast majority of simpler titles then you're doing something very wrong (very bad hacks).

There are also some advantages to debugging the emulator with multiplatform games with a PC version, you can compare the graphical output for example and try to find bugs in the RSX codepath, even though the games are not exactly the same. Also, there are many reasons why someone would want to play a console version of a game over a PC port. For example on LOTR Conquest, the disc of the PC version is rare to find (was sold by a short period of time) and it was delisted on Origin short after releasing, and the PC version does not have any of the DLC that released in console. On Minecraft, the game is different than the PC version and allows for native multiplayer splitscreen, which is something surprisingly requested a lot.

Most developers aren't even interested in any PS3 exclusives in particular (I've only played like 1 AAA PS3 game myself), but instead on the challenge of emulating and preserving the platform. This doesn't mean the games won't be preserved, they will, but no one is going to rush a bunch of hacks to the emulator just to get all the AAA working perfectly first and complicate development.

(03-30-2020, 03:13 AM)Ani Wrote: [ -> ]We're preserving the console, not the specific games. Work on preserving the PS3 game library is being done by projects like Redump and No-Intro, and the vast majority of the library is already preserved. Blu-Rays also last a lot longer than CDs and DVDs so there is still a lot of time to preserve what's left as far as physical games go. As long as the games are preserved, it doesn't matter how much time an emulator takes to get to a state that can play it, because it's already successfully preserved so it's only a matter of time.

Furthermore, general improvements will eventually make these AAA games work. These games already have special attention anyways because they have the most people testing them and making bug reports on top of them. You can't expect an emulator in Alpha to just be running the most demanding games of the platform. If you have an emulator that runs all the demanding exclusive games but not the vast majority of simpler titles then you're doing something very wrong (very bad hacks).

There are also some advantages to debugging the emulator with multiplatform games with a PC version, you can compare the graphical output for example and try to find bugs in the RSX codepath, even though the games are not exactly the same. Also, there are many reasons why someone would want to play a console version of a game over a PC port. For example on LOTR Conquest, the disc of the PC version is rare to find (was sold by a short period of time) and it was delisted on Origin short after releasing, and the PC version does not have any of the DLC that released in console. On Minecraft, the game is different than the PC version and allows for native multiplayer splitscreen, which is something surprisingly requested a lot.

Most developers aren't even interested in any PS3 exclusives in particular (I've only played like 1 AAA PS3 game myself), but instead on the challenge of emulating and preserving the platform. This doesn't mean the games won't be preserved, they will, but no one is going to rush a bunch of hacks to the emulator just to get all the AAA working perfectly first and complicate development.

This answer need to be on the frontpage of the web or in one of the appropiate sections.
Clarifies a lot.

Thank you very much for your thoughtful and informative response!  Your point about efficiency and how the process of testing and debugging work are well taken.