Vista On A PS3


Apparently you can run pretty much anything on a PS3. [mopx0] has managed to get Vista running on his PS3. He used Qemu 9.0.1 to install Vista on a PC. He says it takes “about a day or so”, after using Vlite to speed it up, so be patient. You then make an image of the install and copy it to your PS3. Don’t worry though, your hard work will be rewarded by a speedy 25 minute boot time when you’re done.

Even though it is extremely slow, to the point of being nearly unusable, its good to see people pushing the boundaries of our hardware’s intended use.

[via PS3scene]

16 thoughts on “Vista On A PS3

  1. Just an idea…:

    Why not cut out the fuzzy bits of the video instead of giving excuses for doing a poor job… Also the video could have done with being a lot shorter with more content, like for example benchmarks or instructions how to do the installation.

    All in all, good work, although I have to say it’s hardly surprising it works, since this is exactly what qemu is designed for.

  2. Hmm, probably would have been ALOT faster if you had figured out how to get vmware on there. QEMU isnt exactly know for its blazing emulation speed. And on many cameras you can turn off autofocus, and if not you could have fixed it by opening a text file and blowing up the text so the camera could see it instead of showing off your cruddy desktop.

  3. QEMU is an x86 emulator — you can run pretty much anything that needs an x86 architecture in QEMU. Whereas something like VMWare or Xen is a virtual machine, which actually runs the OS natively on the CPU, and therefore requires an x86 machine to work. All that this is saying is that qemu is runnable on PowerPC processors (the main CPU the PS3 has). On top of that, it would have taken 20 some minutes to boot Vista even if you were running QEMU on your own machine — that’s because it’s an emulator!

  4. I believe quemu is required bcause the PS3 processor isn’t the x86 that windows expects. Thats why the emulation is so slow. (whenever the emulated and emulating processors are different, expect a 90% slowdown)

  5. Instead of trying to find a screen cap app for the PS3 another solution would be to make use of a video capture device though this would require booting in 480i mode or if your lucky the TV sometimes has a video out port for VCRs which down converts everything to SDTV.

    Though I’ll admit QEMU is slow even for an emulator too bad there isn’t a way to get MacOS for PPC running via MOL on the PS3 and then run VPC on that.
    Though the PS3 is still memory limited only 256MB for the general purpose computing PPE.

  6. You should open your package manager and install recordmydesktop. It’s an open source video capture program that you could have had on the host machine. It provides much better quality than your camera.

  7. Why would anyone invest the effort to port Vista to *anything?* The end result is akin to putting a turd in an omelette… Interesting to be sure, but not something I’d want to have.

  8. Are you kidding? This makes me so sad. The PS3 is such a limited platform (256MB non-upgradable ram) why should we care? How is this a hack (install a readily available program, BFD)? And why is it useful?

    I’d be more interested if someone could figure out how to upgrade the ram.

  9. As hpux said “I’d be more interested if someone could figure out how to upgrade the ram.” I mean come on vista is so stupid, yea I’m gonna go get a new pc just to run a new OS? not likely. And vista on the ps3 it just a big WTF? why would someone want to take a $400-$500 game system and turn it into a slow as hell windows vista os? The only thing I would put effort into putting vista on would be the mac pro desktop XD and then only as a dual boot.

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