PlayStation 2 Recompilation Project Is Absolutely Incredible

Posted by croes 6 hours ago

Comments

> The PlayStation 2’s library is easily among the best of any console ever released, and even if you were to narrow down the list of games to the very best, you’d be left with dozens (more like hundreds) of incredible titles. But the PS2 hardware is getting a bit long in the tooth

Besides the library, the PS2 is the most successful video game console of all time in terms of number of units shipped, and it stayed on the market for over ten years, featured a DVD drive, and at one point was positioned by Sony not just as an entertainment appliance but as a personal computer, including their own official PS2 Linux distribution.

In a more perfect world, this would have:

(a) happened with a hypothetical hardware platform released after the PS2 but before the PS3, with specs lying in between the two: a smidge better than the former, but not quite as exotic as the latter (with its Cell CPU or the weird form factor; whereas the PS2's physical profile in comparison was perfect, whether in the original form or the Slim version), which could have:

(b) resulted in a sort of standardization in the industry like what happened to the IBM PC and its market of clones, with other vendors continuing to manufacture semi-compatible units even if/when Sony discontinued it themselves, periodically revving the platform (doubling the amount of memory here, providing a way to tap into higher clock speeds there) all while maintaining backwards compatibility such that you would be able to go out today and buy a brand new, $30 bargain-bin, commodity "PS2 clone" that can do basic computing tasks on it (in other words, not including the ability to run a modern Web browser or Electron apps), can play physical media, and supports all the original games and any other new games that explicitly target(ed) the same platform, or you could pay Steam Machine 2026 prices for the latest-gen "PS2" that retains native support for the original titles of the very first platform revision but unlocks also the ability to play those for every intermediate rev, too.

Comment by delaminator 1 hour ago

> and at one point was positioned by Sony not just as an entertainment appliance but as a personal computer with their own official PS2 Linux distribution.

to avoid EU import taxes

Comment by joshu 37 minutes ago

it was a dreadful, useless computer, even then

Comment by emodendroket 4 hours ago

This is cool but of course it's only going to be a small handful of titles that ever receive this kind of attention. But I have been blown away that now sub-$300 Android handhelds are more than capable of emulating the entire PS2 library, often with upscaling if you prefer.

Comment by observationist 2 hours ago

Moore's law never ceases to amaze (the vulgar version where we're talking compute/dollar, not the transistor count doubling rate.) It won't be too long before phones are running AI models with performance equal to or better than current frontier models running on $100 million dollar clusters. It's hard to even imagine the things that will be running on billion dollar clusters in 10 years.

Comment by freedomben 2 hours ago

I do hope you're right, but I'm quite skeptical. As mobile devices get more and more locked down, All that memory capacity gets less and less usable. I'm sure it will be accessible to Apple and Google models, but models that obey the user? Not likely

Comment by timschmidt 2 hours ago

As state of the art machines continue to chase the latest node, capacity for older nodes has become much less expensive, more openly documented, and actually accessible to individuals. Open source FPGA and ASIC synthesis tools have also immensely improved in quality and capability. The Raspberry Pi Pico RP2350 contains an open source Risc-V core designed by an individual. And 4G cell phones like the https://lilygo.cc/products/t-deck-pro are available on the market built around the very similar ESP32. The latest greatest will always be behind a paywall, but the rising tide floats all boats, and hobbyist projects are growing more sophisticated. Even a $1 ESP32 has dual 240mhz 32bit cores, 8Mb ram, and fast network interfaces which blow away the 8bit micros I grew up with. The state of the open-source art may be a bit behind the state of the proprietary arts, but is advancing as well.

It's really fun to have useful hardware that's easy to program at the bare metal.

Comment by direwolf20 12 minutes ago

Even when technically accessible to individuals it still costs at least 10k$

Comment by deadbabe 38 minutes ago

They will not build that phone because then you won’t subscribe to AI cloud platforms.

Comment by jkingsman 3 hours ago

It really is incredible. I've been playing through my childhood games on retro handhelds, and recently jumped from <$100 handhelds to a Retroid Pocket Flip, and it's incredible. Been playing WiiU and PS2 games flawlessly at 2x res, and even tackling some lighter Switch games on it.

Comment by reactordev 3 hours ago

It truly is. My issue though, like in 2010 when I built an arcade cabinet capable of playing everything is you eventually just run out of interest. In it all. Not even the nostalgia of it keeps my attention. With the exception of just a small handful of titles.

- Excite Bike (it’s in its own league) NES

- Punchout (good arcade fun) NES

- TMNT 4-P Coop Mame Version

- NBA Jam Mame Version

- Secret of Mana SNES

- Chronotrigger SNES

- Breath of Fire 2 SNES

- Mortal Kombat Series SEGA32X

- FF Tactics PS1

I know these can all be basically run in a browser at this point but even Switch or Dreamcast games were meh. N64/PS1/PS2/Xbox was peak and it’s been rehashed franchises ever since. Shame. The only innovative thing that has happened since storytelling died has been Battle Royale Looter Shooters.

Comment by Novosell 2 hours ago

Outer Wilds, Baba is You, Blue Prince, Hades 1&2, Disco Elysium, Hollow Knight, Slay the Spire, Vampire Survivors, Clair Obscur, What Remains of Edith Finch, 1000xResist, Return of the Obra Dinn, Roboquest, Rocket League, Dark Souls, etc. I could go on, and on, and...

Not rehashes. Original, phenomenal games covering damm near every genre and if there is a genre you're missing, I can find a modern game to match.

Do you actually engage with modern games?

Comment by chongli 1 hour ago

Those may be some amazing games you listed but none of them scratch the itch that some folks have for twitchy NES games. For some reason, modern indie developers never try to emulate the tight, twitchy, highly responsive controls of NES games. Instead, they go for floaty, slow acceleration-based, more forgiving controls.

The puzzle games in your list have no equal though. The NES is pretty light on puzzle / adventure games, though it did receive really nice ports of the MacVenture games (Deja Vu, Uninvited, Shadowgate) as well as Maniac Mansion, and it has a couple of unique ones with Nightshade and Solstice that blend in a bit of action while remaining primarily adventure games.

Comment by CoolGuySteve 1 hour ago

A large part of this is because the latency on modern TVs can be anywhere between 4.7ms and 150ms so games have to allow for a lot of slack in their input.

The NES and SNES had 1-3 frames of latency depending on the game.

Comment by anyfoo 1 hour ago

Dark Souls and Hollow Knight were among the listed titles, come on.

Comment by phatfish 2 hours ago

Of course there are good modern games, but I agree there was something special about the first 3D generation of hardware (hardware cheap enough to be in home consoles at least) and the games it enabled.

Only VR has come close recently, but that hasn't hit in the same way because it is still too expensive and cumbersome.

Comment by reactordev 2 hours ago

This. Half-life was amazing, and not because it was Quake 2. It was a story. Less about blowing stuff up with guns and more about uncovering the secrets of Black Mesa. Then came along mods…

The first one was Team Fortress. Remember that? Still strong today as a ftp title TF2. The second one was a spec-ops style delta force mod (I can’t remember the name) but it gave the 3rd modder the idea that a modern setting could work. Counter-Strike was released as an early alpha on my forum and the rest was history.

I mention this because this was a tuning point from fixed function pipelines to programmable pipelines (shaders).

There was this awe of what we can do, what could be possible, and today’s modern games are a fulfillment of that. I feel this same sense of awe when it comes to some of these foundational models. It’s just incredible what they are capable of.

In reality, while AAA titles have been pumping out annual titles to keep shares high and pigs fat, there have been some wonderful indie titles, smaller budget games, that have made a significant impact on the games industry as a whole.

Comment by lgl 34 minutes ago

> Half-life was amazing, and not because it was Quake 2.

Half-Life used the GoldSrc engine [0], based mostly on Quake 1 and also some parts of QuakeWorld and Quake 2

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoldSrc

Comment by anyfoo 1 hour ago

I loved Half Life 2, and it was highly influential, but that influence lives on.

Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium, Dark Souls, and Return of Obra Dinn were among the mentioned titles. All of these games tell a story, each of this game does it in its own, magnificent way.

You act a bit like those kind of games are hard to find, but some of them are highly popularized best sellers that keep getting remasters (I don't mean remakes), and still find a huge audience in entirely new YouTube Let's-Plays alone.

Comment by reactordev 2 hours ago

Ok, I’ll give you Rocket League. That’s an entirely new spin on a genre I didn’t see coming. The rest are just RPGs or platformers you like. Good games, but not innovative. Yes, some new franchises have been born and some successful indie titles have been launched but most of the market share in the games industry is held by the top 5.

Yes, I have over 1,000 games in my Steam library going back to 1999. I engage in most games that make the top 500 and have so since I was a teenager making games myself.

Comment by mietek 2 hours ago

So, is Outer Wilds a RPG or a platformer?

Comment by reactordev 2 hours ago

Open world game but also a mystery game as we’re a couple others mentioned above. Those go back to Carmen San Diego and Sherlock homes series. Open World, we’ve seen plenty of those.

Comment by gambiting 1 hour ago

Well, nothing new has been invented since checkers, if you really think about it hard enough and reduce everything to a few buckets of games that everything can fit neatly into, then everything is just a mystery game or just open world or just a platformer. Again, I have a feeling like you're just looking at it mechanically and not how these elements work together to produce a game that is larger than just the sum of its parts. Outer Wilds has puzzles and open world and mystery element to it - and all of those have been done before. But has anyone else combined them this way to produce a game with this narrative? No, I don't believe so(happy to be proven wrong, as always).

Like the other commenter said - I hope I don't become jaded like this about video games, it still brings me joy to see how every new game twists the known formula a little bit more and in new and exciting ways, I believe there are several nieches where we haven't seen the game of that genre yet and I can't wait to see it emerge and how and who is going to do it.

Comment by reactordev 1 hour ago

Have other games put together open world and mystery? Yes.

I have a feeling you haven’t played those games otherwise you’d see the similarities.

Yes, I am ABSOLUTELY looking at the mechanics of the game. I’m also looking for innovation. Take something someone tried (maybe it was a big part of their design) and make a full blown out version of it. Pushing the genre in either a new direction or opening one up. Outer wilds did neither. Not to say it wasn’t a good game. That’s not at all what I’m saying. I’m saying outside of those that played it, it will be forgotten. It changed nothing. It came, it endeared, it left.

Comment by 22 minutes ago

Comment by TimorousBestie 2 hours ago

I hope I never become this jaded and cynical about video games.

Comment by reactordev 1 hour ago

Keep playing them for 20 years :D

Comment by anyfoo 1 hour ago

Into the Breach only came out 8 years ago, but I'm still playing it vigorously.

I'm sorry to say, your nostalgia-colored-glasses are so strong, you're actually blinded by them. I grew up in the same gaming era as you (started around early to mid 90s, but the peak was later), and I too have fond memories. But there undeniably has been some magnificent progress in pretty much all aspects of gaming.

Somewhere between 2005 and 2010, I thought I had outgrown gaming, and that no game would have anything to offer to me anymore. But years later I learned that that was just because I was stuck thinking that JRPGs were the pinnacle of gaming, it turned out that I had grown out of those. Obviously your story will be different, but I bet there is some story to you somewhere.

Comment by lgl 28 minutes ago

This! Both FTL and Into the Breach are evergreen games imho.

Comment by Novosell 1 hour ago

I've been playing games since I could hold a controller basically, so 26-ish years, and I think modern gaming is phenomenal. I feel sad for you, but it is what it is. Just your loss in the end.

Comment by reactordev 1 hour ago

Modern gaming is a micro transaction DLC hellscape. Are you serious?

Are they fun? Yes, they are designed to be addictive. So you spend money on pixels.

Comment by Novosell 1 hour ago

None of the games I mentioned have micro transactions.

Outer Wilds, 1000xResist and What Remains of Edith Finch all moved me to tears. I still can't casually listen to the soundtracks of Outer Wilds or 1000x, as they simply evoke too many emotions.

Stop conflating Call of Duty and the like with "modern gaming".

You're jaded, and I feel sad for you.

Comment by anyfoo 1 hour ago

Maybe give it another try? I have been playing lots of games for the past few years, some vigorously. Not a single one of them has a single microtransaction, because that's an immediate turnoff for me.

Comment by charcircuit 1 hour ago

What’s wrong with paying for entertainment?

Comment by reactordev 1 hour ago

Nothing, that’s why I bought the game. Don’t shake me down for more money because you couldn’t forecast.

Comment by charcircuit 27 minutes ago

Microtransactions are part of the forecast of revenue the game will make.

Comment by anyfoo 1 hour ago

So Dark Souls is just another RPG, and not innovative?

Comment by gambiting 1 hour ago

>>Good games, but not innovative

Calling outer wilds or Clair Obscur "not innovative" just tells me you haven't played these games from start to finish, and I don't mean any offence saying this. Unless you mean just mechanically?

Comment by reactordev 1 hour ago

I have played both. I stand by my statement.

Comment by haunter 2 hours ago

>The only innovative thing that has happened since storytelling died

lol

There are countless already classic modern story driven games which pushing the boundaries of video games forward.

I know nostalgia is a very strong drug and I also love the games I grew up with in the 90s but it's pure ignorance to say that 1, "storytelling died" 2, no innovation happened in video games in modern times (whatever that even means)

Comment by reactordev 2 hours ago

You are misconstruing my love for nostalgia games for when you think I believe storytelling died. It didn’t die in the 90s, it died in 2010s. Everything since 2018 that I have played has been relatively easy to guess the plot line or it didn’t ever materialize to begin with.

Comment by josephg 1 hour ago

These days there's 200-350 new games released on steam every week. There's plenty of excellent narrative driven games if that's what you're after, mostly from indie developers.

If you're looking for deep narrative from AAA games, then the best you'll find are games like Cyberpunk 2077 - which have some decent writing in between all the action. But if you want something that'll really scratch a strong narrative itch, you gotta go deep on indies. That's where all the experimentation is happening.

You might also just be getting more genre savvy with age. When you're a kid, story beats are mind blowing. But most narratives - especially in games - tack pretty close to classic hero arcs. Once you've seen 100 of them you can often predict the entire narrative arc once you've seen the end of the first act. In other words, it might not be that games have gotten worse. It might just be that you've gotten better at understanding classic narrative structures, so it takes more to surprise you.

Comment by reactordev 1 hour ago

It’s definitely an age thing. Wisdom of experience and being able to dissect storytelling elements for what they are.

Don’t get me wrong. I love games. Obviously. I just see, as you said, 300+ games being released weekly and have really no desire to pursue them. I’ll occasionally jump on the bandwagon of steams top 100 but I don’t feel connected to the games I play anymore. I still play them. It’s good entertainment. I don’t care about buying battle passes, season passes, trinkets, cosmetics, DLC content, etc. If the game is good, sell the game.

Comment by gambiting 1 hour ago

>>Everything since 2018 that I have played has been relatively easy to guess the plot line

Be honest- you guessed the plot of Claire Obscure before you got to Act 3? Or the plot of Death Stranding 1 & 2 before you finished them?

What kind of games have you played since 2018? Because yeah, there is a lot of predictable cookie cutter AAA games out there, sure. But each year there are games which are surprising in their storytelling, same as somehow there are still new and surprising films despite film being much older than gaming. Not to mention books.

Comment by reactordev 1 hour ago

Yup, town plagued by supernatural, everyone depressed, just another Ubisoft title they could have had but didn’t.

By Act 2 the story was already falling apart. The game just leaves you feeling depressed. I guess since you felt something that makes it GOTY.

Comment by leguminous 51 minutes ago

I disagree. There are some new (sub-) genres and great games since that period.

* Roguelites have proliferated: Hades is the most obvious example, but there are a variety of sub-genres at this point.

* Vampire Survivors (itself a roguelite) spawned survivors-likes. Megabonk is currently pretty popular.

* Slay the Spire kicked off a wave of strategy roguelites.

* There are "cozy" games like Unpacking.

* I don't recall survival games like Subnautica or Don't Starve being much of a thing in the PS2 era.

* There are automation games like Factorio and Satisfactory.

* Casual mobile games are _huge_.

* There are more experimental games, sometimes in established genres, like Inscription, Undertale, or Baba Is You.

Not to mention that new games in existing genres can be great. Hollow Knight is a good example. Metroidvanias were established by the SNES and PS1 era, but Hollow Knight really upped the stakes.

I'm sure I'm forgetting things and people will have some criticism, but I really don't believe games have stagnated in general.

Comment by mlyle 2 hours ago

For the oldies but goodies in my list:

- Any one of the 194_ games

- Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past

- Super Mario World

- Final Fantasy VI, VII, IX

- Chrono Trigger (agree)

- Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition

- Metal Gear Solid 1-3, MGS: Peace Walker

But I think there's been good stuff since.

- The Super Mario Galaxy games

- Super Monkey Ball

- MGS4, MGS5

- Witcher 3

- The Bioshock games

- Minecraft-- probably the game with the most replay value of anything of all time.

I don't know what will stand the test of time. I don't want to play any of these games now, since I've burnt them out, but at some point I'll likely want to play them again...

- Undertale

- Bravely Default

- The Octopath games

- Dispatch

- AstroBot

- Clair Obscur

Comment by reactordev 2 hours ago

Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition (whichever was the one with the most characters) as well as Street Fighter Alpha were great for the arcade machine.

Most of my buddies at the time would come over, have a beer, immediately hang it on the boat-coozy cup holders (the ones that gyro) and go to town shoulder to shoulder playing SF2. The cup holders gyro would prevent the beers from spilling as the arcade cabinet rocked back and forth from two grown men having a virtual fist fight. Best times.

Comment by chongli 1 hour ago

If you're struggling with keeping your attention, you ought to try making a list of games you never finished (or never played) and commit yourself to playing through them in order. I have been doing that with NES games and really enjoying it. I alternate between RPGs/adventures and action games, to mix things up a bit.

Recently, I have played through Faxanadu, Dragon Warrior, Blaster Master, and am now working through Fire Emblem (translated from Japanese).

Comment by RGamma 1 hour ago

Baldur's Gate 3 has awesome story telling for video game standards. Plan 100+ hours for a reasonably complete first playthrough though.

Comment by bluescrn 1 hour ago

It's called getting older.

As a grown adult, nothing can recreate the feeling of exploring a new game as a child/teen. Especially during the 80s/90s, where gaming as a whole was new and rapidly-evolving.

But revisiting old favourites for the nostalgia can still be enjoyable.

Comment by fragmede 2 hours ago

Paradox of choice. When you were single digit/low double years old, and you only had 3 games, you had to play the shit out of them. With every game available at your fingertips, there's no such compunction.

Comment by reactordev 2 hours ago

Blockbuster and Funco Land gave me all the titles I could get my 7 year old fingers on.

Comment by irishcoffee 2 hours ago

> N64/PS1/PS2/Xbox was peak and it’s been rehashed franchises ever since. Shame. The only innovative thing that has happened since storytelling died has been Battle Royale Looter Shooters.

I was a kid when ps1/n64 came out so I also have a lot of nostalgia about that era of gaming.

However…

There are a ton of great games out there from this era. Hell, the Uncharted series and Expedition 33 will get you 100-200 hours of excellent gameplay, Elden ring is another 200. Lies of P is a fantastic game, 50-100 more. The star wars Legos and star wars Harry Potter games are a lot of fun to play with kids, and Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom are the Zelda games we wanted on n64 as a kid, I love those games. And they’re not a rehash, at all.

There’s a lot of fun things out there to play if you poke around. Your local library might surprise you with the collection for completely free games you can borrow. Modern games even.

Comment by techpression 2 hours ago

What? Dreamcast was a marvel when it came to games, Crazy Taxi, Virtua Tennis, Power Stone, Jet Set Radio, Grandia, SoulCalibur etc.

Comment by reactordev 2 hours ago

SoulCalibur was better on PlayStation.

Dreamcast’s only hit was Crazy Taxi.

Comment by egypturnash 23 minutes ago

Jet Set Radio Spiritual Sequel is getting to be its own genre at this point.

Comment by wahnfrieden 2 hours ago

The Demons Souls lineage titles are another valuable innovation (I understand the earlier inspirations it had but those aren't playable like these modern ones)

For MAME I recommend trying Pang and Super Buster Bros

Comment by 40 minutes ago

Comment by pjmlp 2 hours ago

And then folks waste whole that power away, with embedded widgets applications.

My Android phone is more powerful than the four PCs I owned during the 1990 - 2002, 386SX - P75 - P166 - Athlon XP, all CPU, GPU, RAM and disk space added together.

Comment by PlatoIsADisease 2 hours ago

I sit here with a laggy windows 11 computer with an Nvidia GPU and wonder: WTF

Its fine with Fedora, but Windows 11 is terrible.

Comment by pjmlp 1 hour ago

Another one full of Webview2 instances because new hires cannot code anything else, apparently.

They aren't to blame, management is.

Comment by josephg 1 hour ago

They all bear some of the blame.

Software engineers are hired to be the expert in their field. If you don't learn your craft, managers aren't going to do it for you.

Ideally new hires would be mentored by senior engineers who understand performance, and who can teach new hires how to write (and ship) good, performant software. But unfortunately that doesn't happen anywhere near as often as it should.

Comment by PlatoIsADisease 47 minutes ago

Maybe. I had a director that fired anyone who wouldn't use Microsoft Power Automate.

Previous to that director, I built stuff in python for 5 years under a different director.

Comment by grimgrin 3 hours ago

I'll take a longbet with you that this or successors tackle more than a small handful of titles

We live in interesting times

Comment by lysace 2 hours ago

There is so much work hunting down the proper upscaled/improved texture packs though. Supposedly.

Comment by PlatoIsADisease 2 hours ago

I gave up video games, but I remember that being a huge reason why I picked Android a decade + ago. Emulators :D

Apparently now iphone allows it. Eventually Apple gives features that are standard elsewhere. Veblen goods...

Comment by Onavo 2 hours ago

I suspect we will see a proliferation of emulator development in the next few years.

In a lot of ways, emulators are the perfect problem for vision/LLMs. It's like all those web browser projects popping up on HN. You have a very well define problem with existing reference test cases. It's not going to be fun for Nintendo's lawyers in future when everybody can crowdfund an emulator by simply running a VLM against a screen recording of gameplay (barring non deterministic éléments).

They can't oppress the software engineering masses any longer through lawfare.

Comment by flykespice 3 hours ago

What the dev of AertherSx2 did to run games smooth, even on my midrange 2019 android phone, is wonders.

Too bad the dev is a very emotionally unstable person that abandoned his port, despite his big talent.

Comment by Sarkie 3 hours ago

Wasn't he hounded by users as usual?

Comment by siev 2 hours ago

Yeah and he didn't want to deal with receiving death threats for working on a passion project. Which I guess is considered being "emotionally unstable".

Comment by dottjt 3 hours ago

On the flip side, maybe those traits are what lead to the existence of the emulator in the first place. Better something than nothing.

Comment by bananaboy 2 hours ago

Link to the actual project rather than just a news article about it https://github.com/ran-j/PS2Recomp

Comment by ZX8301 2 hours ago

90% of the PS2’s floating point throughput is in the two vector units, not the R5900 conducting them. Concentrating on that, as the article does, seems as futile as focussing on the 68000 rather than the Amiga PAD in a 16-bit context (ignoring the EE’s 16-bit RAMBUS bottleneck).

However that approach will probably suit the least-ambitious PC-ports to PS2 (by studios that didn’t appreciate the difference) - rather as an ST emulator was a short cut to run the simplest Amiga games.

Comment by OneDeuxTriSeiGo 3 hours ago

On this topic of ports/recomps there's also OpenGOAL [1] which is a FOSS desktop native implementation of the GOAL (Game Oriented Assembly Lisp) interpreter [2] used by Naughty Dog to develop a number of their famous PS2 titles.

Since they were able to port the interpreter over they have been able to start rapidly start porting over these titles even with a small volunteer team.

1. https://opengoal.dev/

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp

Comment by wmf 4 hours ago

An application of the first Futamura projection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation

Comment by jszymborski 4 hours ago

I read this as Futurama way too many times

Comment by suprjami 4 hours ago

So did I. Considering there is a PS2 Futurama game, it seems a reasonable mistake.

Comment by jszymborski 3 hours ago

honestly I kept thinking of this https://theinfosphere.org/Futurama_theorem

Comment by masfuerte 3 hours ago

Is it? It would be if it partially evaluated a MIPS emulator on a particular game. But it doesn't seem to work like that.

Comment by wmf 2 hours ago

"Decoding the MIPS R5900 instructions in each function Translating those instructions to equivalent C++ code Generating a runtime that can execute the recompiled code The translated code is very literal, with each MIPS instruction mapping to a C++ operation." It sounds like a MIPS interpreter that gets statically unrolled.

Comment by masfuerte 2 hours ago

Yes, it's like the result of unrolling a MIPS interpreter, but there never was an actual MIPS interpreter.

I thought the point of the Futamura projection was that there was actually partial evaluation happening, i.e. you take a real interpreter and specialize it in some automated fashion. That's what makes it interesting.

But I could well be wrong about the naming. It doesn't really matter what it's called if we're all clear about what's actually happening.

Comment by xnx 3 hours ago

Emulation is already amazing. What can be done with recompilation is magic: https://github.com/Zelda64Recomp/Zelda64Recomp

Comment by bri3d 2 hours ago

See also: XenonRecomp, which does the same thing for Xbox 360, and N64:Recompiled which does the same thing for N64.

Note that this "recompilation" and the "decompilation" projects like the famous Super Mario 64 one are almost orthogonal approaches in a way that the article failed to understand; this approach turns the assembly into C++ macros and then compiles the C++ (so basically using the C++ compiler as a macro re-assembler / emulation recompiler in a very weird way). The famous Super Mario 64 decompilation (and openrct and so on) use the output from an actual decompiler which attempts to reconstruct C from assembly, and then modify that code accordingly (basically, converting the game's object code back into some semblance of its source code, which this approach does NOT do).

Comment by brcmthrowaway 16 minutes ago

Whats the best PS2 game of all time?

Comment by colordrops 2 hours ago

> So yes, currently playing PS2 games on PC via emulator is still absolutely fantastic, but native ports would be the holy grail of game preservation.

I would think that emulation of the original game as closely as possible would be the gold standard of preservation, and native ports would be a cool alternative. As described in the article, native ports are typically not faithful reproductions but enhanced to use the latest hardware.

Comment by snvzz 9 minutes ago

Indeed, the focus for preservation would be to increase the accuracy of emulators.

pcsx2 is pretty good today in terms of running games (there is a single digit list of games it does not run), but it's far from accurate to the hardware.

Porting to current systems via recompilation is cool, but it has very little to do with preservation.

Comment by hn_user_9876 1 hour ago

This is amazing for preservation. Being able to run these classics on modern hardware with native recompilation is a huge step forward.

Comment by ChrisMarshallNY 3 hours ago

This sounds very cool, but I can practically hear the IP lawyers sharpening their buzz-axes...

Comment by chippiewill 17 minutes ago

Sony have actually been fairly chill about emulators etc. so I'd be surprised if lawyers got involved here.

They actually used an open source Playstation emulator when they released the "Playstation Classic" in 2018.

Comment by doublerabbit 3 hours ago

Or as in cartoons, IP lawyers with dollar symbols in their eyes.

Comment by denkmoon 2 hours ago

Only in terms of their own salaries and bonuses. For all their litigiousness over emulation I can't imagine it really makes them money.

Comment by dylan604 2 hours ago

Do IP cases ever make anyone other than outside counsel money?

Comment by flykespice 3 hours ago

I wonder how they will tackle the infamous non-conformant Ps2 floating-point behavior issue, that is the biggest hurdle on emulating Ps2.

Comment by toast0 2 hours ago

As of now, it looks like they're ignoring it:

https://github.com/ran-j/PS2Recomp/blob/91678d19778891b4df85...

   #define FPU_ADD_S(a, b) ((float)(a) + (float)(b))

(etc)

But if you wanted to handle it, you'd presumably macro expand the floating point operations to something that matches the PS2 fpu (or comes closer).

Comment by mikepurvis 3 hours ago

Some context for others who were unaware: https://github.com/PSI-Rockin/DobieStation/issues/51

EDIT here's potentially a better link: https://www.gregorygaines.com/blog/emulating-ps2-floating-po...

Comment by kmeisthax 2 hours ago

PS2 floating-point behavior is one of the few hardware misfeatures so awful it affects emulation of competing systems[0]. The game True Crime: New York City is so dependent on PS2 floating point that the GameCube port installs an error handler just to make 1/0 = 0. Which isn't even PS2 hardware behavior. But it is "close enough" that the game does not immediately throw you into the void every time you step on a physics object.

[0] https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2021/11/13/dolphin-progress-rep...

Comment by realusername 2 hours ago

Probably the same way as the emulator themselves, with a list of titles needing the real PS2 floating point.

A lot of titles don't actually need it and work fine with standard IEEE floating point.

Comment by imtringued 3 hours ago

As far as I know, static recompilation is thwarted by self modifying code (primarily JITs) and the ability to jump to arbitrary code locations at runtime.

The latter means that even in the absence of a JIT, you would need to achieve 100% code coverage (akin to unit testing or fuzzing) to perform static recompilation, otherwise you need to compile code at runtime at which point you're back to state of the art emulation with a JIT. The only real downside of JITs is the added latency similar to the lag induced by shader compilation, but this could be addressed by having a smart code cache instead. That code cache realistically only needs to store a trace of potential starting locations, then the JIT can compile the code before starting the game.

Comment by bri3d 2 hours ago

JIT isn't _that_ common in games (although it is certainly present in some, even from the PS2 era), but self-modifying or even self-referencing executables were a quite common memory saving trick that lingered into the PS2 era - binaries that would swap different parts in and out of disk were quite common, and some developers kept using really old school space-saving tricks like reusing partial functions as code gadgets, although this was dying out by the PS2 era.

Emulation actually got easier after around the PS2 era because hardware got a little closer to commodity and console makers realized they would need to emulate their own consoles in the future and banned things like self-modifying code as policy (AFAIK, the PowerPC code segment on both PS3 and Xbox 360 is mapped read only; although I think SPE code could technically self-modify I'm not sure this was widespread)

The fundamental challenges in this style of recompilation are mostly offset jump tables and virtual dispatch / function pointer passing; this is usually handled with some kind of static analysis fixup pass to deal with jump tables and some kind of function boundary detection + symbol table to deal with virtual dispatch.

Comment by bluGill 3 hours ago

Yes, but in practice that isn't a problem. People do write self modifying code, and jump to random places today. However it is much less common today than in the past. IT is safe to say that most games are developed and run on the developers PC and then ported to the target system. If they know the target system they will make sure it works on the system from day one, but most developers are going to prefer to run their latest changes on their current system over sending it to the target system. If you really need to take advantage of the hardware you can't do this, but most games don't.

Many games are written in a high level language (like C...) which doesn't give you easy access to self modifying code. (even higher level languages like python do, but they are not compiled and so not part of this discussion). Likewise, jumping to arbitrary code is limited to function calls for most programmers.

Many games just run on a game engine, and the game engine is something we can port or rewrite to other systems and then enable running the game.

Be careful of the above: most games don't become popular. It is likely the "big ticket games" people are most interested in emulating had the development budget and need to take advantage of the hardware in the hard ways. That is the small minority of exceptions are the ones we care about the most.

Comment by bri3d 2 hours ago

This is PS2 emulation, where most engines were still bespoke and every hack in the book was still on the table.

Comment by duskwuff 2 hours ago

How many PS2-era games used JIT? I would be surprised if there were many of them - most games for the console were released between 2000 and 2006. JIT was still considered a fairly advanced and uncommon technology at the time.

Comment by bri3d 2 hours ago

A lot of PS2-era games unfortunately used various self-modifying executable tricks to swap code in and out of memory; Naughty Dog games are notorious for this. This got easier in the Xbox 360 and PS3 era where the vendors started banning self-modifying code as a matter of policy, probably because they recognized that they would need to emulate their own consoles in the future.

The PS2 is one of the most deeply cursed game console architectures (VU1 -> GS pipeline, VU1 microcode, use of the PS1 processor as IOP, etc) so it will be interesting to see how far this gets.

Comment by duskwuff 1 hour ago

Ah - so, not full-on runtime code generation, just runtime loading (with some associated code-mangling operations like applying relocations). That seems considerably more manageable than what I was thinking at first.

Comment by bri3d 37 minutes ago

Yeah, at least in the case of most Naughty Dog games the main ELF binary is in itself a little binary format loader that fixes up and relocates proprietary binaries (compiled GOAL LISP) as they are streamed in by the IOP. It would probably be a bit pointless to recompile Naughty Dog games this way anyway though; since the GOAL compiler didn’t do a lot of optimization, the original code can be recovered fairly effectively (OpenGOAL) and recompiled from that source.

Comment by vyr 1 hour ago

[dead]

Comment by keyle 59 minutes ago

Side note, are we at the level where tech blogs and news site can't even write <a href> links properly?

2 out of 4 links in the article are messed up, that's mind boggling... On a tech blog!

Is that how far deep we've sunk to assert it wasn't written by AI?

Comment by simondotau 33 minutes ago

A more accurate version of the famous idiom:

Those who can, do (and sometimes become teachers when they get older). Those who can’t become journalists.