I think it's probably a long ways to emulating PS3... The custom chips for PS3 were nortoriously hard to program for, and i'd think similiarly difficult to emulate (If not in complexity than in sheer processing power required); Although a lot of companies demanded a simpler GPU so maybe it wouldn't be that hard...

You might be surprised. The RPSC3 games compatibility list has grown substantially over the last couple of years.

Emulation is not something I care about for ps3 games are nothing of interest. That said. You can emulate such game perfectly fine with many titles.
The problem is not that you cant. The problem is the cost of the machine o run it on is more than the value of what you would play. As in, unless you plan on playing fifty or more games. The value of buying a pc capable of running the ps3, is pointless.

Also, in most countries you have a legal right to backup any title you own and no government agent can arrest you for even downloading titles either. Because they have no way to verify what you own, nor right to question you about any property you own. At least in usa, canada and uk.

Downloading stuff however is sketchy as f**k and while you can do so....you always take your chances regarding, killing your pc.

Perhaps. I know it's difficult to emulate PS2 games on PCSX2 on my machine, Quadcore 4.7Ghz, plus an MSI video card. I really don't see how it can get easier without more cores running or a lot of workarounds/simplifications. I also have difficulty getting decent speeds with the GC emulator, trying to replay Dark Alliance is choppy at best.

I really wish i was a hardware engineer. I'd put the popular CPU's on a card you can put in, and have emulators optionally just run code directly on the CPU with a few DMA mappings and a wrapper to connect to the video/sound/input devices.

PS2 games are indeed somewhat hard to emulate and need a beefy single core CPU but I played Shadow of the Colossus on a Sandy Bridge i5 laptop (i5-2520m) with easy-to-run settings.
I recall 1/2gen Ryzen was a bit slow on emulation at higher/accurate settings but other than that, most games run ok.


GC (Dolphin) is very easy to run and while I don't know Dark Alliance, most games run on lower end hardware just fine. Most laptop Celerons can run GC games, heck my old tablet powered by a z8350 Atom could run Mario Sunshine (because it's a native 30fps game and not 60).
Either you have some weird settings or something fishy with your PC...

There's speedup options to use more threads, basically extra threads do math calculations to offload a bunch of work off the single processor. I'll bet it's akin to the FPU (in that you give the FPU work, and you come back later and check if it's done and if so you either wait or get the results)

Or maybe i just chose a bad game to emulate. PS2 can't emulate Dark Alliance except in software, because it does some funky things to get AA reflections and other effects. I'm sure it's very similar on the GC.

Let's see settings. Dual core, idle skip, JIT recompile, DSP HLE audio, CPU clock override 50% (which seems to be okay for the game).

I do remember years ago getting sent a modified Smash Bros to play online with and playing it smoothly on weaker system with nearly no issues. But not being big on Smash i didn't keep it.

Bruh...wha are yout guys talking about. Even low tier laptops can run GC and ps2 perfectly. So well in fact, if you wanted to upscale them, you can. Even cheap laptops from walmart can do this without over clocking. Just have to know what to use.

What 'low tier laptop' can you show that will run a PS2 game perfectly? I'd like to see it. I like using Dark Cloud 2 as a benchmark point.

I also saw an article to emulate the 4.77Mhz 6502 processor 'perfectly' took something like a 6-8Ghz cpu. But we don't usually care about 100% perfect emulation, only that the instrucitons are run and you add some pauses after so many ms of cpu usage to keep it in time with normal time.,

The PS2 is a 800Mhz plus a GPU you're emulating (or forwarding most GPU instructions). Full software emulation typically is something like 300x slower (or more) than the hardware you're emulating. With JIT and other you can probably speed it to close to say 4x slower (and maybe better but the instruciton set differences means there's quite a bit of loss still, example x86 you're running on has registers EAX, EBX, ECX, EDX, ESI, EDI to work with, while other ARM processors have 32 universal general purpose registered named r1-r32.)

Now backing up; If you were saying the N64, PS1, Genesis/Mastersystem, SNES, NES, Gameboy/Gamegear, Atari/Commodore/Apple emulation could run on a low tier laptop i would believe you. Anything under 100Mhz are far easier to do. Even the PSP is easier to emulate.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RJNnyblhq8I

Low end stuff can run fine native resolution for many games bud. The system you wanna try is up to you but even crap machines can run a lot. Plus you can look for yourself at the ps2 game library to see where you fit with regard to what is compatible on various pc's that have been tested. Just note many machines can run just fine on more than what tester declare.
Also check out youtuber eta prime. He literally test beds all low end crap for this content

Just made fast search and Dark Alliance is Baldur's Gate, right?
It seems to be a really heavy game on PS2 but usually the hardest game to emulate is God of War or Shadow of the Colossus, wich I played on a ~10yo laptop. It had slowdowns here and there but very playable.

The GC version is rated Playable on the Dolphin website. I did download the emulator to check the settings, since I didn't have installed.
That was when I noticed you have the CPU override setting at 50%? That would made a GC run at half the speed, you want it at 100%, more if you don't mind testing and eventually some crashes but it can fix some "native" slowdowns.

If you are using Windows, DX11 seem to be the best option from my testing. Never had any luck with Vulkan and OpenGL on lower end machines is slow AF...

You can extract the disc as either a folder or an ISO file using either a modded PS3 or a computer with a blu-ray driver from a friend/family member.

Well, not sure if counts, but my 2015 laptop with the equivalent of a 1st generation i5 processor, 8 GB of RAM and an Intel HD Graphics can run most PS2 games I have somewhat decently as long as I do some tweaking, and it also can kinda run PS3 and Switch games as long as the games don't have complex graphics (doesn't seem to matter if they're 3D or not).

Also using a lighter OS could help a bit with speed, although it'd be a gamble whether a lighter OS is also good at running games.

Link shows PCSX 1.6.0, which i already have downloaded and have used. Though i don't recall a giant speedup compared to the 1.4.0 version.

I lowered the CPU to 50% remove bad stuttering i had for the most part (and still be fairly smooth). The higher the CPU the smoother a game can be in very chaotic or complex sections in code. But a lot of the time otherwise it may be idling and not using nearly the cpu cycles it could be using. I suppose i could see if i can override to 30FPS vs the 60FPS it tries to do.

Reminds me, i tend to run with power savings and i forget to turn them off even for gaming. Says 80% of max, so 3.5Ghz (My appologizes i said 4.7 earlier, looked at my properties since) reduced probably to 2.8Ghz. Though i still have the 32Gb ram.