The team behind the upcoming Playstation 4 emulator, RPCSX, has released a new version that adds support for audio and gamepads. And, below, you can find a video, showcasing Sonic Mania running in full speed on this promising PS4 emulator.
Now as I’ve said before, Sonic Mania is a 2D game that does not really stress a modern-day platform like Playstation 4. Nevertheless, it’s really cool witnessing a PS4 game running without any visual glitches and with proper audio.
Regarding game compatibility, nothing really changed. RPCSX remains the only PS4 emulator that can boot Bloodborne. However, it cannot run it so don’t expect to be playing it on PC. At least for now.
In theory, once RPCSX can emulate the main features of Playstation 4, the team should focus on making Bloodborne (or any other exclusive PS4 game) run on it. This is what the Yuzu and Ryujinx teams did with Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and it may be one of the reasons why Nintendo Switch emulators are currently as polished as they are.
In short, we don’t expect RPCSX to run Shadow of the Colossus, Bloodborne, The Last Guardian or Drive Club anytime soon. However, one day, we might be able to run Drive Club at 4K with 60fps. This will only be possible on PC as Sony has abandoned this gorgeous-looking racing game, which is locked at 1080p/30fps on PS4.
You can download the latest public version of RPCSX from here.
Enjoy the following video and stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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The major reason why Nintendo Switch emulators progressed so fast was the fact that NVIDIA themselves open-sourced the kernel-level driver code for Tegra devices on Linux.
This alone saved a tremendous amount of time, because reverse-engineering the GPU commands became unnecessary, since developers could just look at the code inside the Linux kernel.
The good news regarding RPCSX is that AMD also actively maintains an official open-source kernel driver within Linux, simply called AMDGPU.
And because the GPU of the PS4 is basically a cut-down Hawaii part (internally called GFX7), getting this up & running should become alot easier.
And a possible reason why this emulator is called RPCSX instead of RPCS4 could be the fact that the OS between PS4 & PS5 is quite similar internally, so once they have reverse-engineered it, getting actual PS5 software running on RPCSX might become a reality much sooner than having to wait 10+ years…
I remember Skyline Emulator made similar progress on Switch emulation on Android where, first they try to emulate Sonic mania on switch, on early stage it was kinda slow and glitchy after few months later , it is become playable with good quality audio support, then after that more switch games start to become playable on switch android which was good progress, RPCSX ended running PS4 game in fully visual , no glitches and with full audio is big step on PS4 emulation , now we should expect some 2D game or visual novel game become playable on RPCSX aka PS4 emulator.
It would be great if this could run RDR sooner than later