Downloading and gaming

[jdcrossed]

Hey all i am trying to download and play some windows based games as i ve seen demonstrated on different sights that also have shotty explainations as to how to accomplish this. To be specific i am aimed at playing World of warcraft on the YDL half of my ps3 and some resources have pointing me toward Wine but im so lost at the begining could somebody save me ?
thanks guys talk to you soon

jd

[spykez]

Hey all i am trying to download and play some windows based games as i ve seen demonstrated on different sights that also have shotty explainations as to how to accomplish this. To be specific i am aimed at playing World of warcraft on the YDL half of my ps3 and some resources have pointing me toward Wine but im so lost at the begining could somebody save me ?
thanks guys talk to you soon

I don't think you may want to do this. Although I suspect it may well be possible on paper with an x86 emulator running wine.

1) the cell as a general purpose CPU is quite weak mainly because of the sacrifices IBM had to make - for one it is in-order and as such cache-misses really hurt it, it will stall its pipeline a lot more and can't reorder instructions. So, it's not like your basic more common garden variety out-of-order deeply pipelined desktop CPU with more exe units and capable of more issues and with larger cache.

Basically for a rough idea I reckon a 970 core to a cell PPU - it's almost like comparing core/core2 to an Atom if you'd like an analogy. Clock for clock the Atom is much, much, weaker. My 624Mhz P3 is about equivalent to my 1.6 Ghz atom. I don't have a 970 but I wouldn't be surprised if there there is a similar difference.

Then you got to factor in the emu software.

2) Not enough memory

3) Graphics - frame buffer only although one could argue running at a lower res on the PS3 may mitigate that a little. Although WoW is old, it still does benefit quite a bit from 3D acceleration.

4) WoW is huge on HD space.

I wouldn't do it. I'll bet there will be a lot of swappage. You are likely to get wtfpwnt.

Rob

[ppietro]

Hey all i am trying to download and play some windows based games as i ve seen demonstrated on different sights that also have shotty explainations as to how to accomplish this. To be specific i am aimed at playing World of warcraft on the YDL half of my ps3 and some resources have pointing me toward Wine but im so lost at the begining could somebody save me ?
thanks guys talk to you soon

I don't think you may want to do this. Although I suspect it may well be possible on paper with an x86 emulator running wine.

Just to clarify a little here.

Wine cannot run on PowerPC processors - like the PPE core of the Cell of the PS3. It requires an x86 family processor.

You could run QEMU, which emulates an x86 PC on the PS3. Then, you could load Linux, which could then run Wine. But, at that point, you'd probably be better off just installing Windows directly on QEMU.

Sidenote: There is also a "slipstream" way of running Wine under QEMU - but we haven't worked on that in a while. This is about as far as we got:
viewtopic.php?f=19&t=4667

Also, normally, QEMU does not support 3D hardware acceleration. (At least, in the last documentation that I read.).

I have seen some QEMU developer blogs that have described experiments hooking QEMU into the Linux host OpenGL API:
e.g http://www.mail-archive.com/qemu-devel@ ... 15702.html
but, since the PS3 only provides a non-accelerated framebuffer display, and does OpenGL through software, this isn't a solution.

So - basically - any Windows games that use 3D acceleration via DirectX or OpenGL won't work at all under QEMU emulation on the PS3. Realistically, only GDI compatible games will work.

Cheers,
Paul