You may have already heard of a PS4 emulator called Orbital making a fair amount of progress recently but, in the last few days, another one has appeared seemingly out of nowhere and grabbed everyone's attention by being the first publicly available PS4 emulator able to play commercial games. Spine was first unveiled by its developer (spinedev) on the /r/emulation subreddit with a video showing it running Mega Man Legacy Collection flawlessly. It was thought to be fake at first, partly for the limited amount of information surrounding it and also due to the developer's lack of reputation, however, an early build was released shortly after that proved the sceptics wrong.

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Spine takes a different approach from the already mentioned Orbital. The latter is a Low-Level Emulator (LLE) focused on mimicking the hardware's behaviour as accurately as possible to run software designed for the platform on another machine, while the former is a High-Level Emulator (HLE) which instead tries to recreate the original platform's functions to run the software on the host, thus trading off accuracy for performance in the process. Aside from the previously mentioned Mega Man title, Spine is also reportedly able to play another game with great results: We Are Doomed.

The emulator is still in early development and is available for Linux only at the time of writing. It's distributed as a standalone Flatpak package, with the only dependencies being GL and SDL2. No source code has been released yet.

Source
Discussion thread

 

[Hacktendo]

Yoooo
Someone get this running on L4T on Switch lol
since it's only for Linux

 

[Bedel]

I would pay for anything to run PS4 games on PC. Just not for the PS4.

You may want to try PSNow then.

 

[EIREXE]

Hrmm, dissapointed there's no source code to the emulator.

The developer does plan to open source, at least.

It really is a different approach, Orbital uses low level emulation and leverages QEMU, this is a more traditional high level emulator.

 

[gnmmarechal]

The crux of your argument seems to be drivers. The AMD Windows drivers do in fact suck. However, that shouldn't be blamed on hardware. After all, the FOSS radeon drivers on Linux kick the proprietary ones arse in pretty much every way and actually outperform the Windows drivers. You have only yourself to blame for expecting Windows drivers to behave themselves. I mean, it's Windows - you know - the OS that BSoD's if you leave it running for more than four days.

Also, lower performance has never been an issue. It's a shortcoming, sure. But an issue? No.

By the way, you're not making your argument any more solid by dumping hashtags at the end of your post. This isn't twitter.

Now, now. I've been running without crashes for 5 days now!

 

[EIREXE]

The crux of your argument seems to be drivers. The AMD Windows drivers do in fact suck. However, that shouldn't be blamed on hardware. After all, the FOSS radeon drivers on Linux kick the proprietary ones arse in pretty much every way and actually outperform the Windows drivers. You have only yourself to blame for expecting Windows drivers to behave themselves. I mean, it's Windows - you know - the OS that BSoD's if you leave it running for more than four days.

Also, lower performance has never been an issue. It's a shortcoming, sure. But an issue? No.

By the way, you're not making your argument any more solid by dumping hashtags at the end of your post. This isn't twitter.

At work we use purely AMD and (unfortunately) on Windows, the performance is pretty nice (vega 56s can be had for cheap) so we are quite happy.

Raw performance really isn't the most important thing, it's the fact the bloody thing works, and the adrenalin software has generally been less of a headache for us than geforce experience.

 

[DKAngel]

The crux of your argument seems to be drivers. The AMD Windows drivers do in fact suck. However, that shouldn't be blamed on hardware. After all, the FOSS radeon drivers on Linux kick the proprietary ones arse in pretty much every way and actually outperform the Windows drivers. You have only yourself to blame for expecting Windows drivers to behave themselves. I mean, it's Windows - you know - the OS that BSoD's if you leave it running for more than four days.

Also, lower performance has never been an issue. It's a shortcoming, sure. But an issue? No.

By the way, you're not making your argument any more solid by dumping hashtags at the end of your post. This isn't twitter.

windows and bsod.....ummm maybe not since windows 7 my pc had an uptime of over 150+ days and not a single bsod so stop spreading FUD esp when graphics drivers will not bring a system down any more, most things have been seperated out so you get very minimal BSOD

 

[Bladexdsl]

oh wow it runs megaman wow even my 1080 ti can't run that! yeah lets see it run dragon quest or the new final fantasy games not gowna happen anytime soon

 

[Unity150_magickavoxel]

Seems supicuous.

 

[Taleweaver]

The emulator is still in early development and is available for Linux only at the time of writing.

Did linux just got his first major timed exclusive game here (even though an emulator is stretching the term 'game' a bit) ?

 

[chaoskagami]

windows and bsod.....ummm maybe not since windows 7 my pc had an uptime of over 150+ days and not a single bsod so stop spreading FUD esp when graphics drivers will not bring a system down any more, most things have been seperated out so you get very minimal BSOD

It was a half-joke. It's fact though that Windows is less stable than Linux, and it's also not engineered as well in certain ways. Windows can survive forever if you leave it idling, but if you're using it constantly, the probability of something going wrong approaches 1 over a period that decreases corresponding to how much crap you've installed.

Also, not seeing FUD here. Fear, unrest, distress? Just not seeing it. If my posts were FUD, so were your posts about ATI cards.

Oh, by the way. On Windows, drivers run in ring 0. Any driver crash or bug will bring down the kernel. That is, unless the drivers run under the user-mode driver framework, which graphics drivers cannot do. And I vaguely recall a recent incident in which spectre/meltdown patches were causing BSoDs due to badly implemented graphics drivers. Hmmm.

 

[raxadian]

Mmm, and how is PS3 emulation going?

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Mmm, and how is PS3 emulation going?

I mean, nearly 90% of PS3 games now go in game on RPCS3, and half of those are marked as fully playable (with some minor bugs, I'm sure) sooo...pretty good for emulation of a console as "advanced" as the PS3 is.

 

[guily6669]

Do we need a 500bucks I9900k and 500bucks 32gb ram to run this emulator?

Nop, I think this needs the Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 costing almost 6000$, the more you pay, the better it runs

But anyway the consoles are already X86\X64, it was cool was if anyone could actually convert the games to run on windows, but they surely will be full of voodoo magic inside so yeah .

 

[raxadian]

I mean, nearly 90% of PS3 games now go in game on RPCS3, and half of those are marked as fully playable (with some minor bugs, I'm sure) sooo...pretty good for emulation of a console as "advanced" as the PS3 is.

By advanced you mean "It was a birch to program for."

 

[AkikoKumagara]

Stick to Gigabyte, EVGA, XFX, Sapphire, and MSI.

Speaking personally, from my numerous experiences, I'd add Asus to this list as well.

 

[smf]

This is the same reason a terminal emulator on linux is a terminal emulator - it emulates a teletype by implementing the relevant control codes in software.

Most terminals used software too, but it was normally in rom and you couldn't change it. Although the DataPoint 2200 could load emulations from tape (the Intel 8008 CPU was designed for it but they ended up shipping a TTL implementation instead).

Oh, by the way. On Windows, drivers run in ring 0. Any driver crash or bug will bring down the kernel. That is, unless the drivers run under the user-mode driver framework, which graphics drivers cannot do. And I vaguely recall a recent incident in which spectre/meltdown patches were causing BSoDs due to badly implemented graphics drivers. Hmmm.

Linux is no different https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html

 

[chaoskagami]

Most terminals used software too, but it was normally in rom and you couldn't change it. Although the DataPoint 2200 could load emulations from tape (the Intel 8008 CPU was designed for it but they ended up shipping a TTL implementation instead).

Interesting bit of history there. Didn't know that. Then again...ancient printers aren't exactly my area of expertise, y'know?

Linux is no different https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html

Nice goal post shifting. I never said Linux was problem free - I said that the FOSS radeon drivers kick Windows' arse and that Windows tends to crash all the time. Did I say Linux was perfect? No. Try a different rebuttal - that one isn't gonna cut it.

Linux is better at surviving partial crashes - a kernel oops usually won't kill the kernel, but under Windows any such similar condition would cause a bugcheck.

Also, half that list doesn't seem to affect me at all, but that's probably because I run Gentoo and manually configure everything.

 

[Sheimi]

Hmmm....i'll wait for bloodborne

 

[kevin corms]

I mean, nearly 90% of PS3 games now go in game on RPCS3, and half of those are marked as fully playable (with some minor bugs, I'm sure) sooo...pretty good for emulation of a console as "advanced" as the PS3 is.

The ps3 is quite exotic, so they are doing great all things considered.

 

[chocoboss]

I like to see ppl telling that AMD is shit ... AMD is in PS4 and Xbox one
AMD will be in next gen console.

AMD is not that bad, you are just fu**** blinded be nvidia and intel that sell you the same thing 2 or 3 time more expensive !