Those of you keen on emulation might find this story interesting. It looks like another PlayStation 4 emulator is in the works. However, what makes this emulator a bit more interesting is the team that’s behind the project. It looks like some of the key individuals to help bring a popular PlayStation 3 emulator into the market are behind this project. A new report from Read Only Memo posted a quick interview they had with the main developer behind the project that goes by DH.
Apparently, this emulator was something that the individual was toying around with. However, they decided to hold off on any big production and announcement until after the PlayStation 5 was already in the marketplace. So now the move to bring out RPCSX is in the works. Apparently, this emulator will have a few notable individuals that worked on the previous RPCS3, so it already has a strong team behind it. But this project is available on GitHub, and DH encourages others to join in and help create the emulator.
During their conversation with Read Only Memo, the emulator will run commercial games, unlike some other PlayStation 4 emulators. It’s a means to ensure that players can keep these games preserved instead of at the risk of being killed off completely. After all, we typically see some games get pulled from the digital marketplaces purely because of various issues like licensing. So this emulation could allow players to enjoy some of the past Sony PlayStation 4 games right on their PC and potentially even have some additional benefits or tweaks after this emulator continues to evolve over the years.
Now there might be a concern that this emulator is a long way off, especially after developers’ struggles when creating the PlayStation 3 emulator. But according to DH, the PlayStation 4 emulation seems quite easy right now with some of the already existing features for WINE. Meanwhile, there is not too much difference between the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3 emulation.
It’s quite easy to do at least for Linux, because there already exist features that were implemented for WINE, but they’re very helpful for us. The main problem is HW device emulation. But it is not really different than with PS3 emulation. The PS4 GPU has 2 bridges to access memory. One is fast (direct memory), one is slow (over CPU). It is almost the same as PC. We still need to make caches, but in comparison with PS3, it seems to be simpler. Shaders are the hard part… At least we have public documentation and do not need to do reverse-engineering like for Nvidia cards for RPCS3.
DH – Read Only Memo
Unfortunately, this goes beyond my knowledge, but the development team working on the PS4 emulator might have no problem progressing through the work. With that said, this is just a hobby for the team, and it’s not their main focus of work, so we’ll just have to wait and see how long it will take before some of these PlayStation 4 commercial games run smoothly on the PC emulator.
