RPCSX PS4 Emulator Will Soon Receive A Major Update

Muhammad Ali Bari January 15, 2024

The RPCSX emulator, which has been designed to run PS4 games exclusively on Linux platforms, will soon be receiving a major update.

Twitter user notnotzecoxao, who is involved in the development of a new version of RPCSX that emulates PS4 games, shared a screenshot of what appears to be the PS4 game boot screen running in a window via the emulator.

He hinted that the PS4 emulator will soon receive a breakthrough update, allowing it to run PS4 titles on Linux platforms. Given the Work In Progress and experimental nature of the emulator, only a select few titles currently get past the boot screen in the publicly available build. We’d imagine the latest build is able to do better, as suggested by the aforementioned tweet.

The developers behind the RPCSX emulator previously worked on the RPCS3 emulator, which allows PS3 titles to run on PC. It is compatible with Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and macOS. The emulator, developed in C++ for x86-64 CPUs, utilizes OpenGL and Vulkan as its backend renderers. Released on May 23, 2011, by DH and Hykem, the project initially started on Google Code and later moved to GitHub on August 27, 2013. Despite initial skepticism about emulating the complex Cell architecture of the PlayStation 3, RPCS3 has achieved the ability to run all commercially-released PS3 games to some extent as of December 26, 2022. The emulator’s journey began with successful runs of simple homebrew projects in September 2011, leading to its first public release in June 2012 as v0.0.0.2.

Since September 15, 2023, the emulator necessitates a 64-bit edition of Windows 10 or higher, a contemporary Linux distribution, macOS 12.0 or later, or a modern BSD distribution. The system should possess a minimum of 4 GB of RAM (8 GB is recommended), an x86-64 CPU, and a GPU that supports either OpenGL 4.3 or higher, or Vulkan (with the latter being the preferred choice). In addition to the game files, the emulator mandates the PlayStation 3’s firmware, obtainable from Sony’s official website.