Is it possible to make one game system that plays PS1, PS2, PS3, XBOX and XBOX 360 games?
Is this even possible?
- Thread starter Lookingglassman
- Start date
with duct tape, anything is possible.
but i'm guessing that is not what you meant.
but i'm guessing that is not what you meant.
You could bash them together into one console case mod that can switch outputs and power inputs (which would be awesome, BTW), but that's pretty much the only way you could get all of those games to work in "one" console unit. I tired to look up such a case mod but couldn't find one, which surprises me, given the number of case mods out there.
If you had a powerful enough computer and the right knowledge of the various consoles firmware and software, you could emulate them. I have everything from a Vic 20 to as Atari 2600 and a N64 on my PC. Same principle, but you need significantly more computing power than the original machine in order to emulate it through software, having to do more computations that the original in order to complete the same task. The general rule of thumb is that you need 100x the computing power of the original in order to faithfully reproduce it. They can barely get a proper PS2 emulator to work, let alone a PS3 with its 8-core processor or the XBox 360. The pcsx2 team said last year they don't think they'll be able to emulate the PS3 for another ten years.
If you had a powerful enough computer and the right knowledge of the various consoles firmware and software, you could emulate them. I have everything from a Vic 20 to as Atari 2600 and a N64 on my PC. Same principle, but you need significantly more computing power than the original machine in order to emulate it through software, having to do more computations that the original in order to complete the same task. The general rule of thumb is that you need 100x the computing power of the original in order to faithfully reproduce it. They can barely get a proper PS2 emulator to work, let alone a PS3 with its 8-core processor or the XBox 360. The pcsx2 team said last year they don't think they'll be able to emulate the PS3 for another ten years.
Back in the day, when The Screen Savers and TechTV were still around Yoshi made a box containing a PC, XBOX, PS2 and a gamecube while still looking sleek and sexy. All in a standard PC case.
The problem is that each system has its own unique architecture. Beyond just getting a CPU and GPU for each system, you need the right kind of memory, bus, and blah blah. I guess there's the thing JW talked about, where you rip the guts out of each system and slap it into a PC case. That's definitely doable, of course it costs more than each of the systems individually.
Sony managed to get the PS1 architecture down to a single chip. It would be awesome if the same could be done for the XBox, PS2, and maybe a handful of other systems, so you just have a mainboard with four or so FPGA sockets, and enough memory and a powerful enough GPU to run one at a time.
Come to think of it, you can do a lot of neat things with FPGAs these days. You could probably get an NES, SNES, Genesis, TG16, N64, and PS1 onto a single chip and install it on an FPGA card. The emulation work has already been done, so you'd just need a good interface to bring them all together. I shall leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Sony managed to get the PS1 architecture down to a single chip. It would be awesome if the same could be done for the XBox, PS2, and maybe a handful of other systems, so you just have a mainboard with four or so FPGA sockets, and enough memory and a powerful enough GPU to run one at a time.
Come to think of it, you can do a lot of neat things with FPGAs these days. You could probably get an NES, SNES, Genesis, TG16, N64, and PS1 onto a single chip and install it on an FPGA card. The emulation work has already been done, so you'd just need a good interface to bring them all together. I shall leave that as an exercise for the reader.
I think the closest we every got to having multiple gaming system hardware under the same hood was the Amstrad mega-PC, of course the only people who could afford to buy one at the time were highly paid assassins and Bill Gates....That £599 is a sale price, the original was £999.
Wow, that takes me back!
VGA graphics! 40MB hard drive! 1MB RAM! 256KB video memory! AdLib sound!
VGA graphics! 40MB hard drive! 1MB RAM! 256KB video memory! AdLib sound!
