Comment by metagame | Hacker News Reader

Comment by metagame | Hacker News Reader

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I think you have a few reasoning errors in your comment:

The PS3 and 360 aren't actually harder to emulate because they have more complex copy protection; they're hard to emulate because they're very novel systems (hardware-wise) and developers had to use all sorts of tricks, which is something their successors are not.

Meanwhile, the PS4 is literally just a PC and already has a pretty good emulator (if early), because the PS4 has desirable exclusives. The author of it only started writing it a couple years ago and it's already booting commercial games and has a handful playable; way faster than old emulator development was! The Xbox One is literally just an NT PC and lack of emulation is largely because there's not really a point to, yet; it's just a PC and has very few exclusives.

The Switch is literally just a phone with a controller and had its first emulator booting commercial video games within the first two years, because it had desirable exclusives.

The Quest is literally just a phone (even moreso, because it's literally Android and even their window manager is just a layer over Unity). It isn't emulated or cracked because it has no really great exclusives and Facebook allows as much piracy as you want.

Windows 98 games are actually pretty easy to emulate; very little at all doesn't work with QEMU out of the box, and that heavy-handed approach probably isn't necessary for the consoles of the future; the PS4 has a great emulator that's basically just a compatibility layer like WINE is, because again, it's literally just a PC.

> Xbox One … lack of emulation is largely because there's not really a point to

I thought it was because no had actually cracked the DRM yet.

Both have the same root problem: There's no incentive. There used to be reasons to crack consoles, and there still is for many of them, and eventually there might be an incentive to for the Xbox One, but there's no reason for the Xbox One to be right now and there never really has been. Pretty much all of the good Xbox exclusives are available on PCs as well (albeit some only via UWP, which had its copy protection broken a long time ago), and almost the entirety of its library is available on either the PS4 or PC, both of which are solved problems. There's not a reason to bother with it while Microsoft's still pushing firmware updates, so there's not as many attempts.

It's also worth noting that plenty of emulators only work with homebrew titles early-on; a lack of a crack for the copy protection wouldn't in itself prevent emulation.

There's tons of incentive. There's over 50 million Xbox One consoles out there, so there's a giant market for people would love to not buy any games for the one time cost of ~$100.

No, you're missing the point. People who want that can buy a PS4, which has always been cheaper, has more interesting exclusives, and as a result has had its copy protection broken since nearly launch.

There's no point in doing it with the Xbox, because the Xbox has no exclusives anyone cares about and is more expensive than a device that sold tremendously better and is cheaper.

This is the same reason people develop private servers for MMOs, and the exact same reason they don't bother doing so for consoles if there's a better edition on another platform.

The niche of "cheap piracy box" has been filled, and the only way for people to have an incentive to hack on the Xbox while firmware updates are still going on is if it suddenly starts getting big exclusives now that it's EOLing.

I'm not missing the point, I just don't agree with it.

There is an intrinsic economic incentive in breaking the console's security, because there's an untapped market of 50M devices out there already. If I have an Xbox One already, am into the idea of piracy (perhaps I bought my Xbox One near launch expecting the same kind of piracy scene the previous Xboxes had), why wouldn't I spend the cost of modchip?

There's a market for the kind of cracking and it's only because of the stupidily good job Microsoft did on the security that you're not seeing a homebrew or piracy scene (and thus not the seeds for an emulation scene).

PS4 has a PS specific graphics API.

This is probably beneficial, as it provides a clean interface for emulation writers to target.

Part of the intent on getting developers to use these APIs as much as possible is to make forward-porting / "legitimate" emulation of games easier.

Ideally you could map API calls to Vulkan but it would still be a huge amount of work.

Like Wine with Win32 and DirectX->OpenGL. 5-10% performance loss on translating is nothing, as the PS4 was low-end hardware for its day.

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