So, I’ve been wondering. On the average desktop PC, what systems can be emulated. Without power being a concern. What aew the other limiting factors?
Nearly all of them.
A better question would be,
which systems can not yet be emulated on PC.E.g.
- PS4 emulation is still in it’s infancy stage,
barely runs games, and has high demands - PS5 emulation does not exist yet afaik
PS5 runs an x64 AMD CPU and GPU, meaning it really shouldn’t take much to emulate. Modern game systems are just customized desktop PCs, unlike systems like the PS3 which had very specialized hardware that’s notoriously difficult to emulate
How much does ps4 demand? Getting a midrange gaming PC soon
I haven’t tested out the PS4 emulators myself yet,
due to them still being in their infancy, so I’m not expecting great play-ability yet.shadPS4 currently is the most promising PS4 emulator though,
in their FAQ they mention the minimum system requirements:However, these requirements likely will not suffice / appear very low to me,
which they also do mention in their FAQ.Also, if you’re interested,
I’ve collected all the open source emulators which I know of
and/or used in the past in a Github list (currently has 111 entries):
https://github.com/stars/Rikj000/lists/emulation
- PS4 emulation is still in it’s infancy stage,
On an average PC probably RPCS3 (PS3) and CEMU (Wii U) will run okay.
Afaik, without power being a concern, pretty much anything until the PS3 that ever got an emulator for it, no matter whichever “host system” (borrowing VM thermology) it got released for, can be emulated on modern computers and systems.
Biggest caveats I can think of would be the options available, and how to run them.
For example, I try to avoid Retroarch when possible, since, to me, too many systems in one interface are a limiting factor, but the only stand-alone emulator that can decently run (imo) the Metal Slug games, of which I love, was some old Windows build of an arcade emulator, so I have to run it within Wine. Similarly, if you wish to run Java Phone games, afaik, you need to run them on a Java Phone emulator for the PSP within PPSSPP.
And on another example, PC-98 emulation is usually accessible only through Retroarch, but it doesn’t seem to be able to mount multiple disks at the same time, and some games need that, so, from what I could find, either you need to figure out how to use DOSBox-X as a PC-98 machine, or you need to figure out how to compile Neko Project II Kai for recent systems.
Old PC games that require Windows’ hardware acceleration and/or 3D libraries may also be problematic to run due to VMs’ development for old system being rather slow. Android also seems to be finicky, with either emulators being full of ads, privacy issues, moody compatibility with proper VM softwares, or taking a comically large space in Android SDK’s in-built emulator.
And progress on emulators for newer systems such as PS Vita, PS4 and Xbox One are slow, progress for Switch appears to be halted thanks to Nintendo, and heard iOS emulation is possible but it is still elusive to me.
So, to sum up, most of the times, even if with varying results, from what I tested and from what I saw being reported, most systems can be run, but may take some case-by-case setting up and testing.
Is 3ds emulation completed? My android devices can’t run some games
Didn’t quite follow 3DS emulation development, so correct me if I’m wrong, but it would seem mostly done. Only StreetPass and multiplayer seem to be a question mark currently.
Oh. So my current bottleneck is power :3
Have a look at QEmu https://www.qemu.org/ 🙂
Any in theory, just have to decompile the existing systems and emulate the parts that need to be emulated.
This takes time is all.
@sleepybisexual well, all of them? The more important question to ask is “how fast?”
Let’s just say playable
