Last time I looked into doing this was more than two years ago. At the time, it was said to be impossible. Any emulators I did find were 100% scams. I'd be curious to see if things have changed lately. That said I own an original 60gb ps3 in near mint condition that I jail broke, I own a pretty big library of games already by pirating played pretty much everything else of interest on the system. Still, it'd be neat to see if it could be done.

>>12987
>with PS3s being pretty cheap now
How cheap? What's a good price to buy a PS3 with e.g. 2 controllers?
>not to mention crackable
Is it easy? Also, can the PS3 run PS2 games?

Welp, I just tried out emulating Disgaea 4 and Atelier Rorona to try it out with RPCS3, and my results kind of sucked.

Disgaea was finnicky and slow but it at least worked without crashing. The intro played smoothly, but after that the loading screen held very low fps. The game itself ran at sporattic speeds, usually slowly and unplayable. However, it never crashed. One odd thing, why I said it was finnicky, was that it actually only was able to run when the emulator window was inactive (ie. I had another window open next to it selected while I played). Otherwise it was so slow I got impatient waiting for the loading screen. Nothing fixed the speed, not adding frame caps nor lowering the res. I read online in a thread (https://forums.rpcs3.net/thread-178092.html) that people seem to get it running fairly smoothly. I cannot reproduce those results. Could be due to changes in the emulator since then, or something else I'm missing. I did take note of gpu/cpu usage while playing which were by no means high, so it isn't pushing my hardware to the limit I guess. Another thing, the sound generally sounded choppy and didn't play smoothly. However, if I moved the window around the screen constantly it played smoothly. Something is very wrong.

As for Atelier Rorona, this ran very smoothly.... until it crashed my graphics drivers. Did this every time sooner or later, always during the intro or at the main menu. Otherwise it ran at a solid frame rate and would have been playable otherwise it seems like. I may need to find some specific settings that it needs, but have yet to do so.

>>12989
Well, somewhere around 60-90 usd or so I'd think would be fair, with a controller. I've seen them go for such prices. I have never tried cracking one so I can't comment on that, sorry.

Post edited on 28th Jan 2018, 7:23pm

>>12989
You can get a used one with games and controllers for like $100 or less off ebay. New, like -$300 I think.

>can the PS3 run PS2 games?
Yes. I've played a few ISOs of ps2 games on my cracked ps3. Physical media ps2 games need an older model of ps3.

>>12990
What are your system specs?

So I got the latest update from the RPCS3 site and now rorona seems to actually run just fine, without crashing, until I save. Thing is, the save works. However, it also crashes when trying to load that save back up, so it's not really possible to play, unfortunately. Seems it needs to be limited to 30 or 60 fps to work too, but not sure. If left unlimited it crashes. Seems it also crashes when trying to synthesize in the game due to the graphics, so yep.

Post edited on 28th Jan 2018, 9:18pm

>>12994
Have you tried save states?
also, I 'think' the ps3 is limited to 30fps, if not most of it's games are. because this is emulation I don't think you can go higher than that unless the game was designed to run at that speed.

>>12995
There are no save states with this emulator. Seems it is under a good amount of development so these types of things I've been running into are pretty common. Pretty cool that they run none the less.

Post edited on 28th Jan 2018, 9:48pm

>>12989
>Also, can the PS3 run PS2 games?
You can emulate ps2 games pretty well on the computer, it's actually pretty nice. Check out Pcsx2. The only issue you might run into is lag depending on the game.

>>12987
Yes and I love it (actually Patreon it). It runs great even on my (upgraded) 2013 gaming laptop at 1080p with Vulkan.

Finished Catherine (undub) with no issues and currently playing Okami HD, both full speed. Also running Drakengard 3 (undub) at around 20fps, but still crashes after the prologue. Nier Replicant still have many issues and runs at very unstable 5-20 FPS on Windows, but over 20 FPS on Linux for a yet unknown reason; development is very promising, though. I also plan to try Persona 5 sometime soon (currently playing Persona 4 on PCSX2).

SPECS:
Lenovo Y510p (upgraded)
i7-4940MX @ 3.6 GHz
2x NVIDIA GeForce GT755M 2GB
16GB DDR3

Catherine CONFIG (for reference):

----CPU
PPU: Recompiler (LLVM)
SPU: Interpreter (fast)
Load libvlv2.sprx only
Preferred SPU Threads: 1
Enable SPU loop detection
Additional Settings: NONE

----GPU
Vulkan
Use GPU Texture Scaling
Strict Rendering Mode
16 Anisotropic Filter
150% Resolution Scale

NVIDIA Profile Inspector: FXAA on

>>12989
>>12999
With my gear, I can also run Shadow of the Colossus (the ultimate PS2 emulation test) on PCSX2 @900p, near solid 50 FPS (full speed for EUR version). The rest of my games (including Ico and GoW) I can run @1440p full speed.

Post edited on 3rd Feb 2018, 10:21pm

So, from what I can tell I most of the problems I was running into were caused by driver crashes or other problems in windows. I haven't downloaded any other games to try out, but the two I used above ran just fine with the opengl renderer in linux. Did come across this text issue though, which happens in windows too. Since Disgaea actually ran at solid fps I got around to playing it for a while yesterday. Wanted to make sure it was indeed the fault of windows/crappy drivers by checking it with the latest version of the emulator, everything acts the same as it did before.

Is PS4 backwards compatible with any ps3 games?

>>13246
No I don't think so.

>>13246
No.