The Future Of Emulators

I'm ditching the W.T thing since it seems unimportant but on to the topic.

We all have seen emulators in action. People making consoles for our computers so we can enjoy old games without having to look around and buying for the sake of it. We've had many emulators and alot to be generous about. So far the latest achievement for emulators is that they a Wii emulator and the PS2 that I've found currently.

Do you think in the near future that our computers could be able to harness the consoles of the 3DS, PSVita, PS3, or XBOX 360 some day?

We could get to it in 10 years or such, but for right now i'm impressed that some emulators can preform as well as the consoles. For an example of computers growing strength, check out the Sega model 3 emulator running Sega Rally 2.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EXbQv4x35o

A 3DS emulator wouldn't be too difficult I would think. And I think some people have created Xbox 360 emulators. If that is true, then good luck finding one.

But really, I'm certain they will appear at some point.

And I'll have to look for a PS2 emulator since I can't find an actual copy of Persona 4 anywhere.

Most PCs can handle games that are even more powerful than 360 or PS3 games.

So yeah, I believe those wouldn't be a problem.

Tyler52 said:

Most PCs can handle games that are even more powerful than 360 or PS3 games.

So yeah, I believe those wouldn't be a problem.

Click to expand...

Not true. You have to actually emulate the processors behind the logic and such if you want to get full compatibility without stumbling on a major incompatibility because you forgot to account for this one quirk of a given system that PCs don't share. This becomes more costly to do, the more powerful the system being emulated gets.

You could probably do high-level emulation that just tries to mimic what the system would do without actually doing what the system does, but this only gets you so far... compare High-Level Emualtion on Dolphin with Low-Level Emulation on Dolphin. LLE is all-around better and more compatible, but requires a beefier machine to work.

Heck, look at the SNES. You think ZSNES is accurate enough? But then you bump into cases where it's not. And the accurate emulator requires a much, much more powerful machine to work correctly.

The highest level emulators that work "fairly well" are PS2, Gamecube, and Wii. And even those are still pretty spotty. I have been able to get Shadow of the Colossus to run at nearly a constant 60 FPS though, which is pretty awesome. DS emulators work fairly well at the moment too. There are no decent PSP, Xbox, or PS3 emulators at the moment.

I think it's pretty impressive how well Dolphin works considering how powerful the GameCube/Wii are. About half of the games I've tried work fine, and my system is far from impressive.

Pretty much anything newer than the SNES will have noticeable issues from what I've seen, and given the complexity of these systems these problems will probably exist forever. I was surprised when I found out the other day how far Model3 emulation had come.

Xbox1 emulators do exist but they each only work with one game currently. Not sure how accurate they are at those games either.