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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An AC also submitted Bloomberg's article.
Nintendo's recent lawsuit against Switch emulator maker Yuzu seems written like it was designed to strike fear into the heart of the entire emulation community. But despite legal arguments that sometimes cut at the very idea of emulation itself, members of the emulation development community I talked to didn't seem very worried about coming under a Yuzu-style legal threat from Nintendo or other console makers. Indeed, those developers told me they've long taken numerous precautions against that very outcome and said they feel they have good reasons to believe they can avoid Yuzu's fate.
[...]
"This lawsuit is not introducing any new element that people in the emulation community have not known of for a long time," said Parsifal, a hobbyist developer who has written emulators for the Apple II, Space Invaders, and the CHIP-8 virtual machine. "Emulation is fine as long as you don't infringe on copyright and trademarks."
[...]
And others feel operating internationally protects them from the worst of the DMCA and other US copyright laws. "I have written an NES emulator and I am working on a Game Boy emulator... anyway I'm not a US citizen and Nintendo can kiss my ass," said emulator developer ZJoyKiller, who didn't provide his specific country of residence.
[...]
Chief among those differences is the fact that Yuzu emulates a Switch console that is still actively selling millions of hardware and software units every year. Most current emulator development focuses on older, discontinued consoles that the developers I talked to seemed convinced were much less liable to draw legal fire.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 07 2019, @11:55PM
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.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07 2019, @11:59PM (3 children)
Memory: 12 GB RAM.
That seems excessive, is it running on a ramdrive?
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Saturday June 08 2019, @12:23AM (2 children)
PS4 has 8 GB of GDDR5 and 256 MB of DDR3 (used for background applications). PS4 Pro increases that to 1 GB of DDR3. 33-45% more RAM for emulation seems reasonable.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 08 2019, @02:16PM (1 child)
It still seems excessive. Does the PS4 have part of the operating system in (E(P))ROM?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday June 08 2019, @07:03PM
PS4 does have EEPROM. Not sure about the amount or function though.
https://www.psxhax.com/threads/ps4-eeprom-dumper-to-dump-playstation-4-non-volatile-storage.783/ [psxhax.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]