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An Anonymous Coward writes:

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 [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 [wikipedia.org] fairly well, but this system currently requires a physical DualShock 4 [wikipedia.org] 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 [soylentnews.org], at GitHub: https://github.com/AlexAltea/orbital [github.com]

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