(08-24-2009, 06:30 AM)brash Wrote: is it more complex to emulate ps2 than the other competing systems of that same generation?
Generally, yes. The main reason isn't the odd custom hardware present in PS2's (although that certainly doesn't help), but rather Sony's tendency toward parallel processing. Most other consoles have been designed with your basic single-task process in mind -- including the latest generation of Xbox360 and Wii. Sony's PS2 and PS3 however are designed to take advantage of fairly advanced parallel processing techniques.
Parallel processing is especially difficult to emulate accurately, let alone efficiently.
The other major challenge of the PS2 that most other consoles don't have to fight with is the PS2's custom non-compliant Floating Point Unit (FPU). Most older consoles were integer only (easy!), and most newer consoles are IEEE standards compliant (same as your SSE unit!). The PS2's is a custom FPU with its own style of math, and that makes exact compatibility difficult and slow.
To answer the OP: Yes, the emu will get faster. But I don't think there's room for more than a general 33% speedup over what we have now -- that's factoring in all the performance bottlenecks that I'm currently aware of.
Translated to layman's terms: If you have a game running 45fps today, someday in the future it could very well run 60fps on the same hardware. Anything slower probably won't get to the 60fps mark though, without upgrading.