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posted by martyb on Friday June 07 2019, @09:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-it-runs-BSD dept.

In its fifth year of life, some promising development of a Playstation 4 emulator has emerged thanks to its mostly standard PC architecture and abundant FOSS projects to draw from. From wololo.net:

Orbital is the combination of three separate projects which together allow us to boot into PS4 kernels. Those being:
orbital-bios, orbital-grub and the most important part: orbital-qemu. A summary of these would be that orbital-bios is a SeaBIOS fork to add support to the PS4 quirks (no VGA, no ISA bus, etc.). This is needed because the PS4 is not really a PC. orbital-grub simply forks GRUB and adds a modified freebsd bootloader to add support for Orbis kernels, since they include custom sections written by Sony and orbital-qemu is a QEMU fork that adds support for PS4 hardware: Aeolia (USB, Ethernet, etc. etc.) and Liverpool (GPU and Audio).

It seems they were able to translate the graphics stack to run on top of Vulcan fairly well, but this system currently requires a physical DualShock 4 connected to the host with USB passthrough. Further, it can only work with decrypted firmwares made available via previously known exploits on physical consoles.

The repository is hosted, somewhat amusingly, at GitHub: https://github.com/AlexAltea/orbital


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Microsoft Agrees to Acquire GitHub... for $7.5 Billion [Updated] 105 comments

[Update 20180604 @ 14:00 UTC: Acquisition confirmed. Microsoft is paying $7.5 billion in stock. Coverage at Microsoft, Security Week, The Register, and The Verge. Also, see the Microsoft blog post. --martyb]

Microsoft has reportedly acquired GitHub

Microsoft has reportedly acquired GitHub, and could announce the deal as early as Monday. Bloomberg reports that the software giant has agreed to acquire GitHub, and that the company chose Microsoft partly because of CEO Satya Nadella. Business Insider first reported that Microsoft had been in talks with GitHub recently.

Time to move off GitHub?

Previously: Microsoft Holds Acquisition Talks with Github

An AC also submitted Bloomberg's article.


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 07 2019, @11:55PM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Friday June 07 2019, @11:55PM (#852892) Journal

    The generation after PS5/XB2 could be streaming games only. So you would have a stopping point for consoles and could work on a single tiny pirate box that emulates every damn console from Atari to Game Boy to PS5/XB2/SwitchPro. Pick a SBC with microSDUC and you could have up to 128 TB of code + games.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07 2019, @11:59PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07 2019, @11:59PM (#852895)

    Memory: 12 GB RAM.
    That seems excessive, is it running on a ramdrive?

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