BIOS/Firmware emulation - what's going on?

Also, Nouveau seems to be a step forward with regards to the "mystery" of NVIDIA GPUs. NVIDIA also reported that they would release more info on their GPUs specificially for Nouveau.

EXTRA: I know that, as of now, emulating the firmware isn't the priority, but I mean in the future it certainly could be added along to benefit the full PS3 emulation experience.

I haven't contributed much and haven't touched the emulator core in a meaningful way but I'm going to give my 2 cents.

As for the GPU documentation, the RSX documentation is very specific on the performance properties and internal architecture (128 bit alignments, exact placement in memory of bitmaps, buffer zones for npot textures, acess to internally swizzled texture formats, etc). The problem we're having is that there's no equivalently low-level interface on the PC side (and before you ask, no, mantle probably won't help us much here). So we have to use the much more higher level OpenGL to emulate the low level GPU commands that the PS3 gcm interface exposes.

Running the firmware on top of the emulator just doesn't seem beneficial enough to me to warrant it. It certainly would save work on implementing all the system calls but emulating the driver interfaces that the PS3 OS seems like it's unecessarily low-level to me. There's a reason why even Sony didn't go that route when they created their PS2/1 and PSP emulators on the ps3 to run their PSClassics (those guys know what they do)

But as Alex said, it's an open source project, you can contribute to it freely and if you don't like the direction it's heading you can always fork it and steer it your way.

Actually, I was just considering forking this, but by myself I'd get nowhere with this (at least not for many, many years). It's best left in the hands of the current team, but development has been a bit slow lately, and I wanted to know that the team is aware of different options. Going down a slow, unsteady road will just put RPCS3 into a halt of no success. One should always consider viable options and cut arounds in development.

If you would like to hear my opinion, I think that more focus should be on the Cell architecture and reverse engineering the game discs(I would do it willingly if I had the means, but as of now I don't).