this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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It is hard. PS3 has incredibly specialized hardware. Even game developers had trouble making games for it at the time because it’s so arcane.
Nah, that's still a bunch of bull, they designed it and have all the documentation. They know all of its functionality, hidden or otherwise, it's "undocumented" functions, it's quirk's, the very ins and outs of it. They probably still have original designers on staff. They have far more knowledge and experience of their own design than any game developers.
And yet RPCS3, an open source PS3 emulator based on reverse engineered research is able to achieve decent playability on most games.
Not to mention, they're a multi-billion dollar company, don't make excuses for them.
AFAIK, the documentation isn’t the main problem. I’m pretty sure PS3 is quite well understood.
The problem is how to translate the code to a typical X86 architecture. PS3’s uses a very different architecture with a big focus on their own special way on doing parallelism. It’s not an easy translation, and it must be done at great speed.
The work on RPCS3 incredible, but it took them more than a decade of optimizations to get where they are now. Wii U emulation got figured out relatively quickly in comparison, even if it uses similar specs to PS3.
Having worked (as a designer, not an engineer) on a PS3 launch tile, this post also aligns with my understanding.