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
(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]