Exactly (referring to more complicated), you are right about the architecture. The PS3 is that complicated, not even Sony themselves have a working emulator for their catalog of games in Playstation monthly subscriptions. Sony emulates PS1 and 2, and PS3 is only streaming and PS4 games are directly compatible with PS5. That’s because PS4 and 5 are similar in the architecture and basically a PC (obviously there is more to it, but CPU is similar).

And that’s why the most advanced PS4 emulator, ChadPS4 … I mean ShadPS4 (the community makes jokes and calls it Chad), doesn’t actually emulate the CPU entirely! Because its similar to a PC CPU, it can use lot of instructions directly. There are other PS4 emulators who try to emulate it entirely, like a traditional emulator.

As for PS3, it is still not in a state like PS2 emulator. Some games work fine and I can play lot of them in full speed without major or any issues. It’s under heavy development still. Some games still are totally unplayable. And depending on how heavy a game is, it can be really demanding on the current modern PCs (I know its a vague statement, its hard to make exact statement for situations like these). I think its still a few years away from how the PS2 performs right now. And then the question if anyone wants to port the emulator to a different architecture… phew!