Which system will see emulators first?

Which of the Next Gen systems do you think will see proper scene emulation and homebrew appearing on first?

The original Xbox enjoyed possibly the best homebrew and emulation scene out of the last generation of consoles. Custom dashboards, homebrew applications and emulators... even complete media centres for streaming media over a network.

The Xbox 360 has been around for a year now and it is quite surprising that people haven't managed to hack it quite as much as the original Xbox. No system hooks or hacks to enable the running of homebrew have been announced as being discovered yet. People keep claiming they have managed to run homebrew on the 360, but they refuse to properly prove it by releasing the exploits into the public domain. It seems it is harder than the original system to hack as it is a technically quite different to the original Xbox which is on the whole very close to a standard PC of the time. I've read that the system can be very difficult to code for to get the most from it and to utilise all three cores of it's custom cpu.

The Wii already has it's Virtual Console so is the prime target for hackers to try and exploit and attempt to run homebrew code on. It's unclear how secure the system is yet but I expect hackers will test this out soon enough.

Finally the PS3. Strange at it seems for something coming from Sony, due the directly supported installation of a second OS being allowed it is already possible to get Linux based emulation and programs to run on the PS3. Therefore technically the PS3 is already the first next gen system to see emulation appear, and with no system hacking required. But... this is just running the emulation via a different OS on the hardware. Will we see true system hacking of the PS3 so that homebrew code can run natively on the hardware without needing another OS installed? I fully expect it will, but how long this takes to happen is anyones guess. For some reason I thing the PS3 may eventually become the most hacked system of the next gen purely because Sony allowing a second full OS to be installed opens the hardware up to be exploited a lot more than the other two systems currently do.

So which of the next gen systems do you think will see the first proper direct hardware accessing homebrew running on?

I see your vote goes for PS3, mine goes for Wii. The Wii will be the easiest for hackers for sure, but you're perhaps right. Do people buying a Wii really want to play retro games? It's already a bit retro, and with all the legally downloadable retro stuff.

I seems that Paradox already found an exploit to run backups on the PS3, so when will the first homebrew run?

An exploit to run backups on the PS3 already! That has to be one of the fastest such exploits on any system to date and great news from my point of view. ;)

I think the only system that got hacked quicker than that was the GBA with fully working GBA emulators released even before the system was on sale. Think Nintendo learnt that releasing a systems complete technical spec prior to launch wasn't the best move ever!

And people were worried that backroom coders and the homebrew scenes seen in the 8-bit and 16-bit days were dead and dying, but with the homebrew scenes on most last gen and next gen systems bigger than ever it seems to be far from the case. :)