PS3 Port?

[R3xVF5]

(04-08-2019 10:44 PM)[Unknown] Wrote:  A PS3 port has several challenges. I should note that several of these challenges are shared by a potential port to the Wii U, which someone put some time into about a year ago. However, I believe they haven't continued since then.

That effort is here:
https://github.com/hrydgard/ppsspp/pull/11001

Some of the challenges:

1. The PS3 is big endian, while the PSP is small endian (so is the Wii U.)

2. The PS3 uses PowerPC, which there's no jit for currently (the Wii U also uses PowerPC.)

3. AFAIU, OpenGL support on PS3s is quite slow. It might require a new graphics backend for good performance (Wii U also had this problem, but a separate graphics API than PS3.)

4. The PS3 only has 256 MB of RAM, which may be a tight budget for PPSSPP. Certain features definitely won't work. It's possible that even save states may not work (since they require temporarily duplicating out some PSP data and therefore a spike in memory usage.)

For most ports (i.e. devices running on ARM), there's really only a thin layer of code needed that interfaces with the operating system. For example, you can see the Android or iOS specific code. That would be the first step in order to get a (very slow) initial concept running using interpreter for the CPU and OpenGL for graphics, but it would at least require dealing with big endian support.

-[Unknown]

Thanx for the summary. Let me maybe ask some additional questions as I have done some programming in the past (assembler, Pascal, C but mostly Java):

1. Endianess. Am I right that this is of concern when switching (transitioning) from emulated PSP to native (emulator) functions and vice versa? Doing this only involves switching byte order on some parameters which should be pretty easy/fast.

2. I was looking at the sources trying to find how JIT is implemented. Is it in Core/MIPS/<arch>? Not really understanding it much. Is the JIT code based on some common framework I could read about to better understand it?

3. The link you posted discusses (I guess) more performance oriented goals. My guess would be that it should be enough to emulate capabilities of HW of few generations back. Do performance issues (on Windows / Linux / Android) arise from weaker graphics specs or other parts cause this?

4. If there are limits than we will have to live with them :-)

Are the platform specific interfaces in Windows, Android, ios directories? Where would I find Linux? Where do I find MIPS interpreter?

Thanx again for information.