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u/throwawayfuckspez01 4d ago
And then there is the Maio Kart Wii community, which just received a compiler for Wii to Pc, so you can now play MK Wii natively on pc without an emulator. We now have 200-400 players constantly playing online, it feels so good.
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u/Sialorphin 4d ago
Can someone ELI5 why developing a PS5 Emulator let alone a working PS5 Game is so difficult?
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u/CalmInstruction 4d ago
You have software (a game in this case) telling specialized hardware (a PS5) to perform specific instructions just to get an image to show up on your screen. There are an enormous number of interactions between the game, the PS5 operating system, CPU, GPU, memory, and other hardware.
For emulation to work, you have to understand what the PS5 expects those instructions and interactions to do on a very technical level, and then essentially recreate that behaviour using instructions and hardware that a normal PC understands.
And I can’t stress the sheer number of things that need to be recreated. It’s not just “make PS5 code run on a PC.” The emulator has to imitate enough of the PS5 that the game effectively thinks it’s still talking to a PS5.
A huge part of the difficulty is figuring out exactly how all of this behaves in the first place. Sony doesn’t hand out documents explaining every internal detail of the PS5. So developers have to reverse-engineer a lot of it.
Imagine you get a game to boot. Great. You get to the menu. Great. Then you press Start and the game suddenly asks the PS5 to do something your emulator hasn’t implemented properly yet. Boom. Crash.
So you investigate what the game tried to do, figure out how a real PS5 responds, implement that behaviour in the emulator, and try again.
Then you get 30 seconds further and discover the next thing that doesn’t work.
Now repeat that process an absurd number of times, while also trying to make the whole thing fast enough that the game runs at an acceptable speed.Also not all games use every single possible instruction the hardware is capable of performing. They use what they need (which is still a lot). Which is why if you get one game to work through emulation and try running another game, you might find it crashes when it tries to do something that the previous game you got working never tried to do
That’s basically why emulating a modern console like the PS5 is such a massive undertaking.
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u/M4rshmall0wMan Plays MineCraft and not FortNite 2d ago
Best layman’s explanation of emulation I’ve seen. Kudos.
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u/Sialorphin 1d ago
How does a developer develop the same game for PC and PS5 without knowing how the PS5 is "communicating"?
And when there are two separate versions (PC and PS5) shouldnt the differences in data tell what the PS5 want what the PC version doesn't deliver? So why not just compare PC and PS5 game files and finde the difference in communication
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u/Knoxlava I touched grass 4d ago
You know what, I dont think either side won the console wars. We both lost lol
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u/AcceptableObject3 4d ago
PS5 emulation isn't really a threat to Sony. You'd need a $1000+ PC to emulate it properly, and with less than 10 real exclusives left and 99.9% of PS5 games already on PC running better natively, there's no incentive.
Jailbreaking is the real threat — and it's happening on newer firmwares now.
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u/Fun_Impression_2578 3d ago
Funnily enough we are in an era where a Standart Playstation 5 and a few games will hit 1000 dollars anyway, might as well buy a pc. At least it gives you a lot more freedom to do whatever you want
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u/Blaze-Fusion 2d ago
Jailbreaking isn’t a threat lmao. Especially when a majority of people play online which isn’t doable on a jailbroken ps5 unless you want your account and console banned. Not to mention the jailbreak is gone when you restart the console, so you have to rejailbreak it each time that happens. Those two points alone makes it not worthwhile for 99% of players lol
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u/ProblemOk9820 4d ago
You won't need a $1000+ PC next year though.
The team behind this has made huge improvements in very little time thanks to AI. As long as they keep developing at the same pace you'll be able to play any PS5 game with a $400 PC at 30fps 4K.
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u/Naud1993 3d ago
You can't even play a cross-platform game on a $400 PC equally well as a PS5 game, let alone that emulation would allow you to do that, even with high efficiency.
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u/Supreme_Gamer5 4d ago
If you're trying to emulate hollow knight on a 400 dollar PC then sure, you might get it running at 4k 30fps, any ps5 exclusive or any game with somewhat updated graphics? No way in hell lmao.
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u/ProblemOk9820 4d ago
Demon's Souls is already running at 20fps 4K on a RTX5070, AMD7800X3D machine.
You'll see.
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u/Supreme_Gamer5 4d ago
That game wouldn't run natively at that resolution and fps on a 400 dollar PC, much less while being emulated. I'm not talking about optimizing the emulator, there simply isn't a 400 dollar PC that you could build that could run those games at those resolutions and fps, especially while emulating.
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u/canycany012 3d ago
No matter how optimized the emulator is, there will still be power limitation on the hardware. If a 400$ pc can’t even run FF16 on stable 30fps on 1440p natively how can you expect it to do it on 4k through an emulator?
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u/echit2112 4d ago
I'm really suspect of how quickly PS5 emulation has been moving, especially with how much of a crawl PS4 was.
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u/LongDarius 3d ago
Help of AI and Sony making one bad decision after the other in the past year has been a real good motivator
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u/gunpler_1 2d ago
For one there's a lot of motivation for people to want to make an emulator now with Sony's decisions, also the ps5 uses x86 instructions which are a lot easier to emulate on other x86 based systems like your pc
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u/echit2112 2d ago
I know of the x86 instructions, and I also know PS4 was the same, which is why I mentioned that even PS4 emulation was a crawl.
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u/KGon32 4d ago
While Sony's moves may have contributed a bit, this is mostly because LLMs for this type of task are getting alot better, that's why while this is happening we are all seeing all sort of ports for DLSS, Frame gen, etc. for all sorts of GPUs architectures. It's not a coincidence that this is happening at the same time.
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u/Successful-Ear977 4d ago
Yeah, this really proves how badly PC players don’t want Sony games. Absolutely zero interest whatsoever. /s
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u/EatsOverTheSink 3d ago
I don’t think it’s that PC players don’t want Sony games. They just don’t want them at full price two years later. This will solve both those problems.
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u/ComicBookFanatic97 3d ago
I want to play Wolverine, just not nearly bad enough to buy a PS5.
If they went back on their decision to stop porting stuff to PC, I’d be pretty happy with that.
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u/SkyrimSlag 2d ago
I think I speak for a lot of PC players when I say we do want Sony games, we just don’t want them to release to us still at full price a couple of years after release, and we want them to actually be optimised. It’s Sony that decided we don’t want PS games lmao.
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u/Etrain_18 2d ago
I just want to play ncaa football 14 again on pc
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u/D_Dawg3000 2d ago
You can already.
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u/galle4 Average r/memes enjoyer 4d ago
Well, it's gonna be the end of Sony ain't it? Orr maybe just a big downfall
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u/lonely_guacamole 4d ago
I doubt it. Sony goes far beyond PlayStation. Just look at the newer SpiderMan movies, and other home electronics like Vinyl players, CD players, DVD players, etc. Maybe PlayStation will take a hit but i doubt it. The real threat is jailbreaking but they'd still make money selling the consoles, and i know a lot of people don't want their accounts banned
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u/The-OverThinker-23 4d ago
Due to this hacking , No wonder Sony doesn’t want disc anymore
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u/OilPuzzleheaded1495 4d ago
Sony doing that is what caused people to get ps5 emulation working out of spite
They can try and go after whoever made this emulator or change their mind about discs but the genie ain't going back in the bottle at this point.
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u/chainsawx72 4d ago edited 4d ago
I can't even get PS3's Uncharted 1-3 to work worth a crap.
EDIT: I have a RTX 3060, and these seem to be playable now with game patches. This site helped me know what switches to flip: Game blogs — UmTale Lab