WARNING. If you are interested in the technical stuffing of the PS3, its historical retrospective, the fight against piracy, the installation Windows and Linuxthen to you Here, here, here and here. People have already written about it, and why waste time on retellings from a layman when there are unique originals.

I thought for a long time about where to start, and I didn’t come up with it… Let’s make a reservation right away that some things that I will mention in the article (for example, the uniqueness of exclusives) have somehow lost relevance in the light of numerous reprints. Also, my subjective opinion may not match yours… So PS3…

Boring introduction

… I am a PC boyar. I didn’t have any consoles from a very early age, and when I saw people playing on consoles, their enthusiastic exclamations seemed incomprehensible to me. After all, almost everything that came out on consoles sooner or later made it to PC. What was on PC rarely found its way back to consoles. Plus graphics, computing power and the ability to use a PC for work and study. And, of course, a keyboard with a mouse is much more convenient compared to a gamepad, especially in shooters. If you want, you can always buy a gamepad and enjoy the original experience.

With such thoughts I lived, I live, and if the world does not turn upside down, I will stick to them for years to come. I understand that somewhere in other parts of civilization, people may not use computers and that consoles offer the convenience of a “plug and play” style. I understand their point of view, but I do not share it.

After all, for convenience on consoles, as a rule, you have to pay with restrictions… BUT…

…There are exceptions to every rule!

And PS3 became an exception to this. As I said earlier, you can play almost all good games on PC. Sometimes, of course, big titles are released with a delay. But they come out…

In general. Almost the entire XBox, PS4, PS5 library is available on PC.

Almost any game from XBox and PS2 or older can be emulated … and emulated on a potato (I remember how I ran DMC 2 on a 2-core Asus k53z in 2011).

But PS3 was hidden between these devices.

So, immediately the thesis:

• A specific architecture that is difficult to emulate.

• An operating system that, with a small file and a screwdriver, allows you to turn the console into a smart set-top box.

• A luxurious BD player.

• A unique library of games that can’t be played any other way

• Backwards compatible with almost the entire library of PS2, PS1,

• Ability to install another OS.

• The opportunity to furrow the seas under the pirate flag!

Of all this, I was only interested in the game library. But why, why were they never ported to PC like later or earlier releases. And the answer lay in architecture. If conventional PS4 has x86 architecture, then porting games to PC is a matter of a few weeks? Days? Clock?

But when the console is an 8-core wonderwaffle based on PowerPC (hello macintosh), which created problems already at the design stage, then, probably, porting such code seems like a non-trivial task. And also costly, and possibly even unprofitable.

And what in the end? And as a result, a lot of games remained locked on this platform. And that was the main reason to want a PS3.

Games

So you probably know the entire list of exclusives that have forever remained the property of the PS3 without me.

• Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of The Patriots.

• Red Dead Redemption.

• MotorStorm: Apocalypse.

• Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch.

• Uncharted 1,2,3 (at the time of purchasing the console, it was not available on PC, and it seemed stupid to take PS4/5 just for the sake of natan drake).

• Puppeteer.

• Resistance 3.

• Valkyria Chronicles.

• Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time.

• Killzone 2.3.

A. well … and of course, hated by me, but adored by my wife (and the PS3 was given to her as a “gift”) Demon Souls (original, not this is your axis)

But the presence of the original Persona 5 on PS3 was a surprise for me, as well as its translation into Russian.

What was pleasantly surprising… is that, with a rare exception (hello RDR), the games are not washed… either in the solution, or in the graphic art, or in HEN the pirated versions tweaked something… but in general, it works smoothly.

Well, as for the resolution, who will look at the pixels from a meter away and sit with the frame rate graphs (joking, if anything, but if something plays comfortably, then why sit and measure something again).

Convenient backward compatibility

Yes, yes, already now, when a lot of time has passed, I found out that backward compatibility is also incomplete, and it is also necessary to mess with it, but at the time of purchase, it seemed to me that just pouring a couple of files to HEN is easier than messing with PCSX2 .

As it turned out, it was not for nothing. I can’t say that I played many games from PS2 to PS3, but:

1. GTA:SA with a yellow filter.

2. ICO (2001).

3. Fatal Frame.

4. Robot Alchemic Drive.

Well, of course, Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga became a good addition … and Devil May Cry 1,2,3, but it’s more a wish than a necessity …

What I haven’t tried at the time of writing this article is to launch something from PS1, like the possibility of eating, but because of “adult life”, work and all that, until I got my hands on it.

All your exclusives on your laptop!

But the opportunity to imagine that you have a Switch from 2006 came as a surprise to me. The point is that the PS3 is able to hold back the games on the PSP portable console.

Of course, in the original, only selected Sony exclusives have this ability, and it all works exclusively through the PS3’s own WiFi, but already in the CDV firmware – there was an opportunity to run anything. And HEN is absolutely the same.

That is, this means that you can run almost any game from the PS3 library, or even backwards compatible games, on your portable console. Why “almost any”? Because some particularly difficult titles rest on the amount of RAM of the PS3, and my console upgrade skills are, unfortunately, limited to changing the drive.

Unexpected problems

Not all the same, the cat is oily. Back in the historical perspective of purchasing a PS3 (spoiler alert, already with HEN on board), I looked carefully at the connectors.

And finding HDMI connectors in the list, I calmed down… And it was my mistake. At that time I was the owner of two twenty-inch squares.

– DELL 2007FP.

– NEC MultiSync LCD2170NX.

Why did I need them? Close to perfect black point. Convenient Pivot and permissions for work. But that’s not the point. The bottom line is that both monitors worked through a Dvi-D-HDMI adapter.

Offtop: Does anyone know if there are larger S-IPS monitors with a similar aspect ratio? Google did not suggest anything specific.

What can go wrong?

All! Everything can go wrong. The first and most surprising thing is that the Playstation 3 (Superslim) simply refused to output images from these monitors.

Turns out there’s some kind of controller inside the PS3 that checks what HDMI is actually plugged into it, and if it’s something that’s not real HDMI, or that something doesn’t have HDCP, then the Playstation will say goodbye.

But the stingy pays twice, the stupid pays three times. After hearing about the magical HDCP, I decided, well, what the hell… I’ll connect via analog…

And I did not see tulips … And in an attempt to understand what exactly I need to connect the monitor to the PS3, at some point I presented the number of adapters, and I thought that it would be easier to have an SSD to the “com” port …

Well… either run all over the Internet and collect adapters, or… In general, a trip to the “analog” hardware store was waiting for me. And it was the best decision, despite the fact that my eyes persistently squinted in the direction of “Avito” in order to buy a monitor cheaper.

The monitor was bought… The cheapest with HDMI. Happily brought home, plugged into PS3. And here she is… Picture…

And the sound? Has anyone thought about him? Well, of course not. And where should he start? Not for S/PDIF or?

There were many thoughts. Here are the most ingenious of them:

1. Buy an HDMI to HDMI+3.5 AUX adapter.

2. Spit on everything and return to the original idea with a hundred adapters.

3. Output sound through a Bluetooth headset from Xiaomi.

But as I said, it was unfortunate that I got the monitor in an “analog” store, so I just returned it and paid an extra $20 for a 27-inch Philips miracle with a built-in speaker. Perhaps the only drawback of this 27-inch wonder was the low pixel density (only 1080P). But it was enough for PS3.

And to be honest, it turned out to be one of the cheapest solutions. Since different types of adapters cost less, their delivery together was close to the difference between a monitor with a speaker and without … and the factory solution is still not a “collective farm”.

Why was this section? To the fact that the PS3 is primarily designed to connect to a TV, and the limited number of connectors can be a nuisance if you don’t think about it in advance.

Raise the sails – HEN

Apparently, the presence of a pirate sail became the main argument for me. The fact is that I was never ready to pay $30-40-50 for games. Even going the license route, there are always options on PC (sale, regional pricing, etc.).

But with PS, the situation has always been a stalemate for me. Buying a $400 device and then having one game at a time costing 10% of the console has always been wild to me. Why, if on PC, there is the same, twice as cheap. And if you wear a triangle, it’s free.

Adequate HEN, which I thought runs … ALL is an elegant solution, and considering the price of the PS3 Superslim in the region of $100, it is the best investment possible.

YouTube on PS3 in 2023 – Still decent

It so happened that after all the ups and downs with the monitor, I was lucky enough to “get” a 36-inch TV (as they say, for a bottle of beer) from Samsung. The presence of the “Smart” prefix was encouraging… After all, TV, which has both the Internet and YouTube…

In general, it turned out that this particular model, released in 2012, does not support YouTube … Well, what … But it is supported in PS3 … I thought …

And after only 5 requests, I got my Movian+YouTube plugin and calmly enjoyed my soap on a 36-inch TV. But on the other hand, better than nothing.

SSD in PS3

I don’t claim to be an expert, and I’ll be honest, I haven’t delved into the ins and outs of PS3 that much… but when using HEN, and saving games to the drive, it feels like some titles (like the first RDR) are unpacked before launch… At least the initial launch, takes an obscene amount of time.

Well … I said, and put the SSD. The loading time of heavy titles has indeed decreased several times. But in-game performance was not affected in any way.

Therefore, it is up to you to install SSD or HDD. The only thing I can say is that the native HDD turned out to be only 5400 revolutions. Therefore, you can replace it with at least a 7200 rpm HDD.

In general, it is worth installing an SSD, if only to reduce the noise from the console a little.

Conclusions!

So, conclusions emerge from the stream of confusion of consciousness. So why the PS3 is a dream console.

– The presence of the pirate flag makes the games absolutely free.

– The ability to combine all the power of PS1, PS2, PS3 in one console (and in the right hands and make it a stray for retrogaming).

— Compatible with both modern TVs/monitors and older TVs (thanks to tulips).

— Access to the human internet from your console.

– BD player for watching anything and everything.

– Remote Play.

And yes, some games like Uncharted got their PC port, and literally in a couple of years, everything will be able to be emulated on new systems, thanks to the increasing performance. But for now, the PS3 is the dream console of 2023.