The developer AlexAltea (Alexandro Sanchez) has uploaded a video showcasing some very interesting developments made to his own PS4 emulator called "Orbital". The major feature being showcased, however, is the emulator being able to output graphics for the first time, which is made possible thanks to a reimplementation of the PS4 GPU graphics pipeline and a recompiler for AMD'S GCN bytecode.

In the aforementioned video Orbital is shown booting a PS4 5.XX kernel into safe mode and displaying a CE-343XX error, which can be taken as reminder of how it's still not meant for users at the moment as it's not able to emulate a working system just yet, let alone play any kind of games. However, the feat becomes quite impressive when taking into account that the error refers to a HDD failure, something the dev was expecting as the emulator was not booted with a valid HDD image, and also how the project has only been in development for a little more than a year.

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If you need some background information on Orbital, it's an open-source PS4 low level emulator which is currently being tested with 4.55 and 5.00 decrypted kernels. The project is different from other console emulators as it's virtualization-based, something made possible by the custom x86 CPU found inside Sony's system and it consists of a fork of GRUB modified to boot PS4 targets (orbital-grub), a SeaBIOS fork for PS4 hardware (orbital-bios) and a fork of QEMU with Aeolia (APU) and Liverpool (Coprocessor\Southbridge) support (orbital-qemu).

Source

 

[Vorde]

Wow it's amazing to see this kind of work being done in such a short period of time

 

[the_randomizer]

Um, I didn't even know this existed O.O

 

[Noctosphere]

I'm not sure to understand...
Video output but no graphics?

 

[DinohScene]

It's not for the avarage user, this is more of a tool for developers and hackers to figure out how the system works and easily test CFW modules on or other homebrew.

That being said, I'm amazed at the speed of development of this.
Great job!

 

[Darksabre72]

Um, I didn't even know this existed O.O

yea it existed for awhile now https://www.reddit.com/r/EmuDev/comments/7phxj9/development_of_orbital_a_lowlevel_playstation_4/

 

[gnmmarechal]

This one's pretty cool.

 

[Foxi4]

This reminds me of the long-since-forgotten attempts at emulating the original Xbox. Unfortunately, that project never quite cracked the nuances of the custom GPU which ultimately was impossible to accurately replicate on NVidia's desktop counterparts. Thankfully nowadays with wonders of virtualisation many of those hardware obstacles can be overcome with code, so this is very exciting.

 

[the_randomizer]

yea it existed for awhile now https://www.reddit.com/r/EmuDev/comments/7phxj9/development_of_orbital_a_lowlevel_playstation_4/

I don't frequent reddit unfortunately.

 

[Plstic]

I wonder if they named it after the group?

 

[osaka35]

Allow for quicker cfw testing? awesome news.

 

[Deleted User]

I wonder if they named it after the group?

This or they named the emulator after the Playstation 4 OS, which is called "Orbis OS"

 

[Bladexdsl]

yeah be about 5 years before this is even close to playing actual ps4 games stably

 

[Kigiru]

People - it's an experimental emulator, it's not for playing games, yet.
Writing this kind of program is not a 1 month thing and will take years from now, but every kind of progress is interesting to watch on its own even if it still means nothing for end users.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

It's not for the avarage user, this is more of a tool for developers and hackers to figure out how the system works and easily test CFW modules on or other homebrew.

That being said, I'm amazed at the speed of development of this.
Great job!

For now. Citra was the same way and to everyone's surprise, one day it was posted that Oot3D could run and was playable on it, which came suddenly.
It may be too slow to be playable even on modern hardware though, it depends on how fast the GPU recompiler is. In theory it should be possible to run on rather low end hardware, since running PC games virtualized doesn't require much better hardware than running them directly.

 

[DanOl98]

This looks really good, the development of this "emulator" is proceeding really fast

 

[Avanders0125]

This kind of makes me want to buy a PS4 now.

 

[hippy dave]

Switch port wen?

 

[gnmmarechal]

Switch port wen?

Right after we get the gacube emeleter

 

[netovsk]

Sony is getting into the play anywhere boat too, although they are not aware of it yet. Nice.