RPCS3 , the PS3 emulator , has advanced by leaps and bounds in the past two years, to the point that there are thousands of perfectly playable titles. With PS4 it was believed that it would be impossible to start emulating it, despite using the same x86-64 architecture as a normal PC. However, this new emulator has shown that it is possible.
Until now there were only two emulators for PS4: Orbital and GPCS4 . The first one has already managed to run the PS4 safe mode, recognize the hard drives and run the bootloader, although it is not possible to run any game. In the case of GPCS4, they have already run the We Are Doomed game, although with bugs, in addition to NieR Automata, which practically did not work.
Spine: PS4 on Linux but buggy
However, out of nowhere a new emulator called Spine has emerged. This third emulator can run between 20 and 50 games . Although they have many bugs and errors , it is a great leap compared to what we currently had available. Most games that can be run are low-power indie titles.
Also, unlike the other two emulators, it should be noted that the emulator is currently only available for Linux. Despite this, it is not very difficult to install Ubuntu or Linux Mint in any partition or storage unit that we have available. If you want to test it, it is not recommended to do it through a virtual machine, since the emulator is in turn another virtual machine that tries to emulate the console hardware, and you can find many compatibility and performance problems. It is also not recommended to use a live USB , being better to install the operating system on a physical drive.
As we see in the following video, the emulator fluently runs some games, while the rest work with a performance at a few FPS that makes them practically unplayable. This is usually due to the amount of resources required to execute each frame, so optimization is a key aspect for the future.
The architecture of PS4, despite being more similar to a PC, has many more instructions and is more complex, so its emulation is much more expensive. However, two years ago it seemed impossible to think that it was possible to emulate PS4 on a PC, and it seems that emulators like Spine are demonstrating that in a few years we will be able to run titles with the same ease that PS3’s are currently running.
The Spine demo can be downloaded from the project website on GitHub .
In the future, it would be ideal for all games to work natively on PC just as Sony is going to do with Horizon Zero Dawn , rather than having to go around using emulators. The PC user community would benefit from being able to play console titles; even if it is years after its launch, and Sony for its part can continue to receive money by selling them on PC, since once the console dies, it is usually not possible to play the titles of that console if it is not with remakes or emulations. Luckily, with PS5 that will change PS4, since both consoles share architecture.
