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Spine, a new PS4 emulator, can already run two commercial games
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.
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.
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Last edited by RattletraPM,
