Monday, September 15, 2008
BDJ on PS3 impressions
JEmu2 on BDJ is now largely working on PS3.
It was really quite a hassle to get things going, but to be honest I'm not really sure it was worth it after all.
The problems with JEmu2 on PS3 are this:
* No sound
* Bad performance
* No VSync
* 60fps are drawn in JEmu2 but less are actually rendered
* Only one directional button gets registered at a time
* Only 2 action buttons available on PS3 controller
The sound problem might be solvable, but the rest is not as far as I can see; they seem to be limitations of the BDJ implementation on PS3. And from what I've read, the BDJ implementation on PS3 is actually the fastest and most complete of all Bluray players, so things don't look good.
The controller problems seem to be the worst to seriously consider BDJ as a gaming platform. "Only one directional button at a time" basically means that it's impossible to do diagonal movement, for example by pressing UP and RIGHT at the same time. This means most action games are out of the window.
The PS3 controller just acts as a Bluray remote here. So the analog sticks and triggers are not registered.
The JVM performance problem follows after the controller problem. The JVM seems to be an old fashioned interpreter, which is only helped by the PS3's CELL performance. A very wild guess would be that performance is comparable to a Sun HotSpot JVM on a 200-300MHz pentium (at the very most, but probably even less!).
The result is that JEmu2 struggles with many games. Don't even think about doing multi-CPU 16 bit games...
No VSync, and not having the ability to actually display 60fps don't help things either.
All is not lost though. BDJ might be a bad platform for emulation, it might still have some use for many game genres.
Considering all the above, it will be well suited for things like Chess and other board games, card games, some adventure games (point-and-click and such), any game that doesn't require fast animation or moving diagonally.
On the plus side, blitting images seems quite fast. Scaling small images to 1080p comes with no perceivable performance cost.
It was really quite a hassle to get things going, but to be honest I'm not really sure it was worth it after all.
The problems with JEmu2 on PS3 are this:
* No sound
* Bad performance
* No VSync
* 60fps are drawn in JEmu2 but less are actually rendered
* Only one directional button gets registered at a time
* Only 2 action buttons available on PS3 controller
The sound problem might be solvable, but the rest is not as far as I can see; they seem to be limitations of the BDJ implementation on PS3. And from what I've read, the BDJ implementation on PS3 is actually the fastest and most complete of all Bluray players, so things don't look good.
The controller problems seem to be the worst to seriously consider BDJ as a gaming platform. "Only one directional button at a time" basically means that it's impossible to do diagonal movement, for example by pressing UP and RIGHT at the same time. This means most action games are out of the window.
The PS3 controller just acts as a Bluray remote here. So the analog sticks and triggers are not registered.
The JVM performance problem follows after the controller problem. The JVM seems to be an old fashioned interpreter, which is only helped by the PS3's CELL performance. A very wild guess would be that performance is comparable to a Sun HotSpot JVM on a 200-300MHz pentium (at the very most, but probably even less!).
The result is that JEmu2 struggles with many games. Don't even think about doing multi-CPU 16 bit games...
No VSync, and not having the ability to actually display 60fps don't help things either.
All is not lost though. BDJ might be a bad platform for emulation, it might still have some use for many game genres.
Considering all the above, it will be well suited for things like Chess and other board games, card games, some adventure games (point-and-click and such), any game that doesn't require fast animation or moving diagonally.
On the plus side, blitting images seems quite fast. Scaling small images to 1080p comes with no perceivable performance cost.
