Support NeoGAF

[CyberPanda]

Alexandro Sanchez has shared a new video for the first Playstation 4 emulator that is currently under development, Orbital. While the emulator is nowhere close to playing or running any PS4 game, it now supports the official Sony DualShock 4 controller, and progresses further on the Safe Mode menus.

In case you weren’t aware of, Orbital is the first dedicated Playstaion 4 emulator for Windows and Linux. Advanced users can go ahead and download an old version of Orbital from here. Do note though that there aren’t any binaries, meaning that you must build each of the three components (BIOS, GRUB, QEMU) yourselves. Furthermore, configuring the emulator to do something will be hard, as you will need to dump and decrypt the entire PS4 filesystem and sflash, including the kernel.

Now I know that this video will not impress most of you, however, I find it a really interesting video. Keep in mind that we haven’t seen a perfect PS3 emulator yet, and someone is already making progress on a PS4 emulator. That’s huge.

Obviously, you should not expect to be playing any PS4 game, like God of War, Marvel’s Spiderman, Days Gone or Horizon: Zero Dawn, with this emulator anytime soon. In all honesty, it could take up to five years (or even more) until we see these games running on Orbital.

Still, I find it extremely cool witnessing the baby steps of this PS4 emulator so go ahead and take a look at it!

The Playstation 4 emulator, Orbital, supports the DualShock 4 controller, progresses further on Safe Mode

Alexandro Sanchez has shared a new video for the first Playstation 4 emulator that is currently under development, Orbital. While the emulator is nowhere close to playing or running any PS4 game, it now supports the official Sony DualShock 4 controller, and progresses further on the Safe Mode...

www.dsogaming.com

 

[LegendOfKage]

One might even say we've come full circle.

*ducks tomato*

 

[somerset]

Fun fact- the more *alien* the hardware, the more success emulator authors have had with emulation. But the closer the hardware becomes to the target platform, the less progress emulators make.

This defies all logic at first glance. Where are the great emulators of the original Xbox? The *first* PC console.

The answer lies with the challenge. As a console approaches a PC in software and hardware design, emulation excellence ceases to be a factor, and another far more *boring* skillset kicks in- virtualisation.

Emulators are written by hobbiests for fun- often peeps learning complex coding solutions as they go along. Virtualisation, while conceptually far more 'doable', just ain't perceived as 'fun' by any coder. And traditional emulation methods feel plain wrong when the source and target are essentially the same.

Do you know how slow it would be to emulate an x86 processor on an x86 processor- and how depressing? But emulating a foreign processor- well that's both fun and free from the depression when first attempts are slow.

Psychology plays a *big* part in coding. I do not expect PS4 or Xbone emulation to ever be a thing worth using. I hope I'm wrong tho.