DLC's availability in the future (split from Mushi HD)

[bcass]

Also throwing in some "science fictional terms" to justify your point is kind of silly.

What's even more silly is that you think that quantum computing is a sci-fi term. Quantum computing isn't science fiction. Quantum chips actually exist now and are being used. The possibilities such technology offers in the near future are enormous. There's only one thing certain about technology - it does not stand still and what seems unimaginable one day quickly becomes a reality. Mercifully for us all, science consists of smart people looking to the future as opposed to small minded people like you.

[ancestral-knowledge]

wow you really are a dick aren't you ?

Do you know what quotation marks are? And where is your proof for the accessability of these computers in the next years? And now hush hush go back to being a dick.

[bcass]

Another one bites the dust. Anyone else want to be trounced in an argument by resorting to childish name calling?

[Ex-Cyber]

Quantum computing isn't science fiction. Quantum chips actually exist now and are being used.

Quantum computing isn't science fiction, but console emulation running on quantum computers is science fiction.

There's only one thing certain about technology - it does not stand still and what seems unimaginable one day quickly becomes a reality

What you don't seem to appreciate about this is that the only certainty about technological advancement is that it will somehow be more advanced. There is no guarantee (and it is not even likely) that the future solution will beat the current one in every dimension (cf. CRT vs. LCD, DVD vs. Laserdisc, etc.).

[bcass]

Quantum computing isn't science fiction, but console emulation running on quantum computers is science fiction.

Which is why I also mentioned organic computing. Which are only a couple of possible futures for computing (including optical computing). They were just a few examples of a possible future. One of them will come to fruition. Maybe something else, maybe some kind of advanced parallel computing. Whatever happens, computing won't stand still, and through one means or another very substantial speed increases in computing power are guaranteed to happen.

[Ex-Cyber]

Quantum computing isn't science fiction, but console emulation running on quantum computers is science fiction.

Which is why I also mentioned organic computing. Which are only a couple of possible futures for computing (including optical computing). They were just a few examples of a possible future. One of them will come to fruition. Maybe something else, maybe some kind of advanced parallel computing. Whatever happens, computing won't stand still, and through one means or another very substantial speed increases in computing power are guaranteed to happen.

One of the things the industry is currently grappling with is that "computing power" is a very broad notion that does not necessarily manifest as the kind of synchronous performance that emulation calls for. If the industry moves toward a more asynchronous model of computing (and some corners already are), there's no reason that we couldn't end up with systems that can render 120 FPS 8K raytraced native games with ease but are simultaneously too slow to emulate a PS2.

[bcass]

Maybe, but your assumption of how emulation might be achieved in the future is based on how emulation is achieved now. Who's to say that emulation will be required at all in the future? What about the ability to clone chips so you're only emulating the architecture, not the processors?

That said, I fully expect most consoles today to be fully functional for the rest of our lives through some means or other. The mechanical parts might start to fail, but there's no reason why the PCBs can't last a life time. There's already optical drive emulators for the Wii and the 360, removing the need for mechanical HDD/DVD drives.

[ancestral-knowledge]

ex-cyber i don't really know why you even keep answering bcass because you are facing an expert of computer science and engineering. bcass just knows that it will be possible. He has laid everything down in this thread (in fact nothing). There are scientist that dedicated their whole life to these matters and even these are not able to say where it's all going but why care about opinions of such idiots when you can just trust smart bcass who obviously has an organic/quantum/whatthefuckwhatever computer at his apartment right now.

He will assure you that we WILL be able to emulate/clone/whatthefuckwhatever xbox360 and Ps3 and whatnot so why do you keep challenging his wisdom? He clearly has a crystal ball and knows that this is what is going to happen. Rational people like you trying to critisize his vision of the future or being just more sceptical are not very welcome. You just have to believe him.

Oh man if we could just use 0,001 % of his brain capacity i think we could even solve problems like hunger or global warming. Damn i bet he is a big shot in real life too. I wonder what i could do in order to get cool like that on the internet. He should just should create a religion we could follow.

OT: We could hope that some games will get rereleased packed with the content that is currently DLC though. This will certainly happen to some more popular games. So you would get a chance to purchase them once again, but yes if Microsoft decides that XBOX Live is kinda meh and shut it down you simply won't be able to access some of your purchased goods/games. It sucks.

[bcass]

Rational people like you trying to critisize his vision of the future or being just more sceptical are not very welcome.

Where did I say he wasn't welcome? You're just ranting now. Unlike you, he hasn't lost all credibility by resorting to childish name calling.

[Ed Oscuro]

I don't know how we got to emulation and quantum computing, but indeed quantum computing exists now. Its main purpose is to deal with complex numbers, factor primes, and do cryptanalysis quickly and more efficiently than a traditional computer, but it seems to me that it would have a lot of use in emulation of analogue systems, for example. When the first practical quantum computer was announced, the developer wasn't offering hardware for sale but they were planning on offering computing services instead. A plug-in quantum computer could be something like a PhysX card (as bcass mentioned, never underestimate what game developers will make use of) and more importantly less obviously something that could simply be folded into a CPU design, like the usual sequential / parallel designs classically attributed to CPUs and GPUs, because it seems to use some fundamentally different structures that couldn't be re-purposed efficiently to work as a sequential or parallel processor.

Given the ability to solve many very complex problems nearly instantly, it seems that emulating a quantum computer with another could involve less complexity than in a usual emulation problem - instead of having to emulate all the logic of another system, as well as store and follow the data and results of all operations, maybe you could just plop down a layer or library for the more traditional computing elements that determine the quantum computing system's response to the quantum analysis, while the quantum calculations themselves no more slowly. It would still require a faster computer for the traditional computing side but the bulk of the work should be no slower.

I see bcass hinting at a replacement of traditional emulation logic with quantum computing; it seems possible but it doesn't seem practical for most calculations within a traditional emulator (MAME for example) for which most emulated calculations have a small number of possible outcomes which a regular CPU should be able to solve quickly. If the problem is encrypted ROMs then perhaps it could be used to reverse-engineer some of that quickly, although MAME's stated purpose is to emulate the underlying hardware i.e. the chips that unencrypt and encrypt data and code, and a quantum computing solution may be quick in these cases but it would not seem to allow the user to follow the actual state of the emulated hardware if it simply spits out the answer to a complex problem. I could be woefully mistaken on this, of course.

[TrevHead (TVR)]

While I think there will be some way to continue playing our 360 games in the future if XBLA ever closes down. I think it will probably be console hacks for a long time before we see emulation. For emulation imo it depends on how complex it is and if there are enough ppl willing to do it. With how MS / Sony and the publishers finding new ways to resell the same games we have already bought in the past, it maybe just the case that not enough programmers care to emulate past systems because they are easily available on a modern console.

For example look at how Sony is doing with the Vita, at first they promised a cheap passport system for gamers to get their PSP onto it. Now theyve gone back on their word for everywhere exept JPN. The problem with this reselling / service crap is that only the most popular games are brought over to the next generation. Look at the 360s emulation of classic Xbox titles. Only a few titles were ever emulated, which in the case of PAL was even less. And because PAL is the only place thats missing titles like Panzer Dragoon Orta and to a lesser extent JSRF, Sega or emulators cant be bothered making them available to us.

If MS ever choose to go the same route as Sony, it'll be a bummer for us guys who love niche games

[Ex-Cyber]

Maybe, but your assumption of how emulation might be achieved in the future is based on how emulation is achieved now.

No, it's based on fundamental requirements and limitations of anything we'd seriously call an emulator, coupled with realistic general expectations about how the industry will likely decide to cope in the medium term with the general limits on throwing more computing hardware at a problem. The short version is that Amdahl's Law is a real bastard when you aren't allowed to redesign the program.

Who's to say that emulation will be required at all in the future?

You're the one who proposed it as the big inevitable solution. Perhaps something else will make emulators obsolete. For example, I can imagine a strong AI programmer so good that it would end programming as a profession (much as there was a time when "computer" was a job title, not a category of machines). If that existed, we could ask it to write clones of all our PS3/360 games for our new computing machinery. I do believe that's possible, but that belief is tempered by a sense that the cardinal sin of futurology is conflating the possible with the probable.

What about the ability to clone chips so you're only emulating the architecture, not the processors?

I'll be right there with you cheering if I live to see the day. I once semi-seriously looked into what it would take to do electron beam lithography in my basement/garage so that I could build, say, a 6502 clone that ran at 200 MHz (surprisingly, the clean room requirements were the real killer; homebrew electron microscopy techniques actually have been documented by more enterprising souls than me).

[louisg]

Maybe, but your assumption of how emulation might be achieved in the future is based on how emulation is achieved now. Who's to say that emulation will be required at all in the future? What about the ability to clone chips so you're only emulating the architecture, not the processors?

There are already some architecture clones based on FPGAs such as the C64 stick and I think someone also did an Amiga. However, there's no reason software emulation has to be any different-- Turing proved a long time ago that hardware and software are literally interchangable, as long as the hardware is digital. And software is easier to manage.

I'm not totally sure what we're arguing here; I just wanted to throw that out

[bcass]

Yeah, I'm aware of the FPGA stuff. It's not beyond comprehension that a more advanced version of that kind of tech would come into play in emulating old systems in the future.

Who's to say that emulation will be required at all in the future?

You're the one who proposed it as the big inevitable solution.

No, I alluded to it being a possibility, one of many. The point being the idea that all these games today are going to be lost in the future is ridiculous. Whether it be via some kind of emulation or simply using hacked hardware, there will always be a way, at least in our lifetime.

What about the ability to clone chips so you're only emulating the architecture, not the processors?

I'll be right there with you cheering if I live to see the day. I once semi-seriously looked into what it would take to do electron beam lithography in my basement/garage so that I could build, say, a 6502 clone that ran at 200 MHz (surprisingly, the clean room requirements were the real killer; homebrew electron microscopy techniques actually have been documented by more enterprising souls than me).

That's the spirit. I knew you'd come round eventually.

[Ex-Cyber]

There are already some architecture clones based on FPGAs such as the C64 stick and I think someone also did an Amiga.

There are multiple attempts to clone Amiga in HDL/FPGA, even. All of which promise pretty considerable success. Still, those are realistically limited to the tens of megahertz operational range, much like Amiga itself. It's not something that's readily scaled to the gigahertz range, even with projected advances in FPGA tech (see e.g. the gap between Xilinx announcing their "7-series" FPGAs and actual silicon availability).

[Ed Oscuro]

Maybe, but your assumption of how emulation might be achieved in the future is based on how emulation is achieved now.

No, it's based on fundamental requirements and limitations of anything we'd seriously call an emulator, coupled with realistic general expectations about how the industry will likely decide to cope in the medium term with the general limits on throwing more computing hardware at a problem. The short version is that Amdahl's Law is a real bastard when you aren't allowed to redesign the program.

I think you're missing bcass's point, because Amdahl's Law explicitly assumes that you're dealing with an improvement in fundamentally similar resources - CPU speed or number of processors in parallel (where it clearly is no help for a nearly completely single-threaded emulator like MAME, which has even stricter requirements). If some technology comes along that offers a fundamentally new approach to the situation then Amdahl's Law will not apply.

Who's to say that emulation will be required at all in the future?

You're the one who proposed it as the big inevitable solution. Perhaps something else will make emulators obsolete. For example, I can imagine a strong AI programmer so good that it would end programming as a profession

It will be interesting to see if our legacy copyright laws are still in place and unchanged at that point. Companies will get richer for doing no tool-assisted work, and will win on scale...it's not a pleasant thought.

[bcass]

I imagine that the rumours floating around the net today that Microsoft's 360 successor will be DLC only will positively enrage some members. A few gaskets will be blown no doubt.

[Ex-Cyber]

Amdahl's Law explicitly assumes that you're dealing with an improvement in fundamentally similar resources - CPU speed or number of processors in parallel (where it clearly is no help for a nearly completely single-threaded emulator like MAME, which has even stricter requirements). If some technology comes along that offers a fundamentally new approach to the situation then Amdahl's Law will not apply.

You're confusing an application of it with the general statement. Amdahl's Law only really assumes that you can divide a process into parts you are speeding up and parts you aren't speeding up. If nothing else, the latter will be imposed by the combination of:

1) emulated programs mutating shared/externally-visible state in the emulated system (which cannot be eliminated because the fundamental nature of an emulator is to run a program that already exists written for an architecture that already exists)

2) communication latency (which cannot be eliminated unless the laws of physics are completely turned upside-down)

Emerging models of computing are primarily designed to cope with the general problem by forcing state sharing operations to be more explicit (rather than "I'll just write this data structure to RAM and something else will read it later") and designing new programs to minimize them, not by assuming that processors will make state sharing as fast as physically possible.

I imagine that the rumours floating around the net today that Microsoft's 360 successor will be DLC only will positively enrage some members. A few gaskets will be blown no doubt.

I'll just blow a gasket when people insist that they own games for that system, because they'll be full of shit (unless the contract looks way, way different from the current XBL/PSN/Steam ones).