Impossible to Duplicate

[wise_evian]

Many emulators, roms etc.. Game console systems becoming more intense with each passing system, yet we still are able to emulate at least for the most part the engines. PC's and game systems all have the basic internal structure with a few add ons.. like xbox etc.. but for the most part they all have a place to dish out the video, the audio, etc.. and of course PC's have this and more.. What puzzles my mind is have the companies tried to come up with ideas to revolutionize the way consoles function? Trying to make it increasingly difficult to emulate? I can imagine some ideas one in which I am baffled as to why they havent done this already... CD Checking in the middle of a game etc.. Because like we all know its simple to break the intro check...but what if it was embedded into many parts of the game/rom/iso etc..? I program games etc.. and it Would make it 10x harder to by-pass if carefully thought out, anyway... I am pro- buying the games etc.. but just curious because im sure console game companies do not approve of emulation. Im just wondering what steps are being planned in the systems of tomorrow. just my two cents peace.

[Betamax]

Hmmm this seems to be more a generic emu discussion than an epsxe one... moving.

Anyways not all companies are anti-emu. Sega for example is very pro-emu. Eg// they have developed their own saturn emu, and used other emus to quickly port specific games in the past. Unfortunatley most companies simply equate emus with piracy, and not as a potential tool that might be benifical to them.

[Demigod]

Consoles like the PSX don't really check CDs though. Maybe at the beginning to see if it's a valid CD but that can be by-passed by special circuitry (*cough*mod chips*cough). Most next-gen consoles will also probably use the original media (or an image of it). Putting in CD checking in the middle of the game won't make it more difficult to emulate, it'll just make pirating slightly more difficult. The primary factor in the difficulty of console emulation is the differences in the system architecture. The way PCs are built and function is usually very different from consoles. Of course you can program anything on CPUs but trying to emulate all console functions onto the CPU takes quite a lot of processing power (which is why systems with a 33 Mhz CPU require at least a 300 Mhz computer to emulate). The best thing console designers can do is try to make their systems as different from PCs as possible. Things like parallel processing are particularly tough to crack, as modern CPUs are only capable of handling one thread at a time and gameplay can quickly go out of sync on it, plus including a lot of special graphics functions and different bus widths and architectures can make emulation very difficult. The goal of emulation is to make the computer think it's another machine. The bigger the differences between the emulator and emulatee, the more difficult it is to emulate.

[takwu]

wise_evian,
I do not think console makers really have enough reasons to stop emulation today. Perhaps you were referring to Playstation or N64 emulation. It was a surprise to everyone that such emulation came about before those platforms died.
In the current generation, emulation of the consoles is not going to be advanced enough to be playable until the next generation comes about. So the console makers aren't losing enough money (or at all) to justify any costly action against emulation.
Furthermore, since the consoles are currently competing each other so intensely, it might be counter-productive for them to implement some emulation barrier instead of improving the console's playability.