The PlayStation 4 emulator, shadPS4, keeps getting better and better. A couple of months ago, the emulator was unable to launch a lot of PS4-only games. But now, it appears that several of them can be successfully launched.
So, below you can find two videos, showcasing shadPS4 launching inFAMOUS Second Son, KNACK, Killzone Shadow Fall and Godzilla.
Now as you will see, most of them are nowhere close to being playable. In fact, most of them cannot go in-game. Still, this is huge news regarding PS4 emulation.
The only game that appears to be in a better state is Godzilla. Now I know that the PS4 Godzilla game wasn’t THAT great. However, as a huge Godzilla fan, I’d love to try it on PC at 4K with 60FPS. Not only does it have the Heisei era suit for Godzilla, but it comes with its iconic music.
I’ve also included below a video for The Last Guardian. The last time we saw this game running on shadPS4, it was a bit of a mess. Not only did it run awful but it also had numerous visual glitches. And although there are still a lot of graphical issues, performance is significantly better now.
So, if I had to guess, I’d say The Last Guardian may be the next PS4-only game to run on shadPS4. As for Godzilla, that’s a niche game so I don’t believe the shadPS4 will be focusing on it.
Anyway, I’m pretty excited watching all these PS4-only games running on shadPS4. From what we know, Sony does not plan to ever port these games on PC. So, the only way to play them on PC will be via emulation.
Finally, Bloodborne is currently in a pretty awesome state. PC gamers can play it from start to finish. Moreover, some mods have been released for it to improve its graphics. And, honestly, Bloodborne on PC via shadPS4 feels almost like a remaster of the original.
Enjoy 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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Really, how did this emulator suddenly emerge out of nowhere and is progressing that insanely fast?
I mean, remember that emulator called RPCSX from the developers of the impressive (but demanding) RPCS3 emulator? What happened to that? What's the secret behind this emulator (shadPS4) making so much progress in just so little months? Is it like that they have reputable developers with years of experience or hired a lot of people all at once or something?
A lot of PS4 emulators have emerged since around 2018 starting with Orbital , which many of them have been either abandoned or made little to no progress since then.
its a long story but someone made a xbox emulator that translated everything from xbox to pc since xbox means directx pc. But it turned out that each game is different so it didnt work as expected, this and the fact people did not capture much of xbox data because "well its like a pc should be easy" really harmed xbox emulation.
Then you got the fact the new consoles were in fact x86 pcs but people did not get complacent and did the work. Then you have the dxvk which was designed to translate directx to vulkan so people can play games on linux without requiring to reverse engineer engines to make them run which is what they did to openmw to get morrowind to run on linux,
Dxvk is used alot in new vegas becaue it translated dx9 to vulkan so the game runs better. In the same way they found a way to translate the ps4 api to directx or vulkan and the architecture of ps4 and pcs are very similar, so in reality its like you are running bloodborne on a virtual machine that translates ps api to vulkan.
shadps4 is a hacky tool, basically they skipped/hack lots of stuff to boot into bloodborne but thanks to popularity they got some contributors that could help
RPCSX is alive and still being developed, hell it even boots games, theres also psOff that just got renderer working (because it was being ported to new architecture) after rewriting the whole architecture of project
the title over sells it, they cant even go in game.
Speak for yourself. My video:
https://youtu.be/5VS3v_Ls4I8?si=blMQwh-jh65dkCrq
And if I remove the FPS cap:
https://youtu.be/5A60ZsiMkeY?si=nI7MHNxk63fzn6_-
Second Son*
i'm so happy about the progress that shadps4 is making, we will preserve the entire ps4 library from being forgotten in couple of years.
Getting exciting seeing this turn into a viable emulator. I just dumped my copies of Bloodborne and Shadow of the Colossus remake onto my PC. Gonna give Bloodborne another year before I play through it though, I want performance to be better and higher resolution support first.
It also crashes from time to time in my experience, for now is better wait a bit.
They need to fix high resolutions since they are currently scaling terribly, Bloodborne can't hit more than 30 or so fps at 4k with a 4080 and the GPU is at 99% even though it's only pulling 100-120w. Most of these early PS4 games had awful aliasing and they look horrible on high res screens.
I mean….
https://youtu.be/5VS3v_Ls4I8?si=lLspfVt-qBb6KLhm You probably have a sh*t CPU or don't know what you're doing.
when I remove fps cap:
https://youtu.be/5A60ZsiMkeY?si=P_pmvun4c0GR-0iN
Holy sh*t you can launch them. Im flabbergasted, bamboozled even.