

The other option being Kreon's alternative firmware for the Samsung SH-D162C DVD-ROM drive, but the existence of said firmware has that drive out of stock everywhere.

You'll need an Xbox or Xbox 360 running custom firmware to dump games. Due to how the data is laid out on-disc, it's not possible to rip them with a normal PC drive. The other big problem is how annoying it is to get games to test with. All the exclusives are on Sony/Nintendo consoles, and they can emulate the multiplats too. The big problem is the same one facing Xbox emulation: no-one cares.

It has far less compatibility than Xenia, and probably isn't the better option, but it's certainly an interesting one. There was also quite recently redex/recompiler, which doesn't emulate games, but converts the entire thing into a native binary ahead of time. You can find a list of playable games here, and it gets a hell of a lot better performance in RDR than rpcs3 does (but is also really broken). Xenia is progressing a lot farther than most people realize because the devs have no concept of public relations. Well, there's only one answer to each of those questions: Xenia and RPCS3, respectively.
