Please allow me to start a dirty rumor, supported only by trends of what gamers have done and what they demand of their new consoles. The PSP is possibly the world's greatest emulation console, and I see the PS3 on the same track. Looking back to the Dreamcast, there are 40 emulators available which allow you to play everything from Arcade Roms, Super Nintendo games to Coleco Vision games. This never caught on for two reasons: (1) The experience sucks, as there is no hard drive and multiple CDRs to juggle. (2) Most of them only run at half speed, as the Dreamcast wasn't powerful enough. On the PS3, none of these problems exist. The stage is set. Sony's recent business decision to openly support a distro of Yellow Dog Linux is a l33t hax0rz dream come true. Just look at the
huge open source emulator library they already have to work with. It's coming, and it's coming fast.
The problem the PS3 does face is intellectual property. Nintendo will never allow every old Mario game on the PS3 online service legally. Learning from the overwhelming demand for homebrew and emulation support on the PSP, what better to solve this problem and unofficially compete than openly release a distro of Linux and strongly support it? The moment that a
secret employee of Sony hacker releases this, the scale for retro gaming tips to Sony. Why? Simple: not only will the price be right, but the library of Nintendo games will be bigger than on the Wii and Xbox Live Arcade. Thus, it is my belief that a virtual console hack is imminent. I predict we'll see it in less than 6 months of the PS3 release, if not sooner. This is pure speculation, but if I'm
not alone. It's dirty, but they don't call it the console wars for nothing.
Contest:
5:55 PM on 11.09.2006
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I'm not by any definition a microsoft fanboy, but jesus. Try to hide your cash for editorial a little better
The number of people who'll use either the PS3 or 360 for unofficial emulation will be a tiny fraction of the whole, and almost certainly not enough to make a noticable impact on sales.
You could argue that the PSP has popularised homebrew emulation (at least, everyone I know with a PSP uses it more for SNES ROMs than anything else), but as near as I can tell PSP emulation has only taken off to the extent it has because the machine and its default functions don't justify the outlay.