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

 

[Ev1l0rd]

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

 

[Mythical]

Well then

 

[D34DL1N3R]

The one showed at E3 seems promising, if i ever build another pc, i would definitely get Ryzen cpu!

I was talking gpu, but I'd have even less consideration for an AMD cpu than one of their gpu's. Haha.

 

[chaoskagami]

← This user was making an idiot of himself with the paragraph formerly here.

And while this is cool and all, source code would be nice. I'm sick of proprietary emulators.

 

[Ericzander]

And while this is cool and all, source code would be nice. I'm sick of proprietary emulators.

Sorry to correct you, but because the PS4 is x86_64, this isn't considered a proprietary emulator. :/

It's a proprietary virtual machine.

 

[Lucifer666]

I want to see how well it runs on ps4 linux

this is evil I love it

 

[DKAngel]

Raaaaargh. Stop calling PS4 "emulators" emulators. They're either virtual machines or compatibility layers. It's not an emulator if it doesn't do instruction set translation. The PS4 is x86_64, and that makes it not an emulator. Of course, that says nothing about how difficult it is to implement one, but it is not an emulator.

And while this is cool and all, source code would be nice. I'm sick of proprietary emulators.

Actualy it is an emulator - Emulate- match or surpass (a person or achievement), typically by imitation. / reproduce the function or action of (a different computer, software system, etc.).

still fits in that catagory.
its not a virtual machine not even close

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

Sorry to correct you, but because the PS4 is x86_64, this isn't considered a proprietary emulator. :/

It's a proprietary virtual machine.

Virtual machine
Kind of software
Description
In computing, a virtual machine is an emulation of a computer system.

well its still emulation lol because thats exactly what a virtual machine is, its an emulator of a system

 

[TheZander]

I hope this ported to the switch i finally wouldn't have to carry my ps4 and games around just play them on the switch

 

[DSoryu]

I hope this ported to the switch i finally wouldn't have to carry my ps4 and games around just play them on the switch

You like to honor the statement in your signature huh? LOL

 

[chaoskagami]

Sorry to correct you, but because the PS4 is x86_64, this isn't considered a proprietary emulator. :/

It's a proprietary virtual machine.

Ahahaha. Okay, you got me there.

 

[smf]

It's not an emulator if it doesn't do instruction set translation.

No, that isn't a true definition at all.

emulate has such a wide and vague definition. Old dot matrix printers had ibm or epson emulation, that just meant they could print the relevant escape sequences and character sets.

 

[chaoskagami]

No, that isn't a true definition at all.

emulate has such a wide and vague definition. Old dot matrix printers had ibm or epson emulation, that just meant they could print the relevant escape sequences and character sets.

See, this is an interesting topic. To clarify, those printers likely translate the escape sequences internally from one spec to another. Therefore, they do in fact perform emulation.

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.

But you're right, I suppose. The definition of an emulator is rather muddy. I suppose it'd be more accurate to call such a thing one term or another based on how it runs the PS4 software. But, well...this isn't open source, so I have no idea really. Orbital is more a virtual machine, however.

 

[Pluupy]

I decided to give an AMD gpu a try with my last build. Nothing but problems. Never again. Problems that have been documented by plenty of people since it's release 6 yrs ago and have never been fixed in a single driver update. It's time for me to upgrade but it's not going to be AMD.

Talk about overreacting. Vague hyperbole. No specifics. Both Nvidia and AMD cards have plenty of issues. If you don't like AMD because of irrational tribalism pride, just say it. Don't claim the cards don't work, because they do. I have used both Nvidia and AMD since I was little and they both have their pros and cons, brand by brand, but never have they been completely shot. Stick to Gigabyte, EVGA, XFX, Sapphire, and MSI.

 

[Ericzander]

Ahahaha. Okay, you got me there.

Didn't mean to make you edit your post, I just couldn't resist, haha.

 

[chaoskagami]

Didn't mean to make you edit your post, I just couldn't resist, haha.

Nah, s'okay. I was asking for that one. Sometimes it's fun to laugh at one's own stupidity.

 

[kuwanger]

500buck 32gb ram

32GB RAM might only be ~$100. Beyond that, now that I have 32GB of RAM...I realize that 16GB was probably more than enough.

 

[Deleted_413010]

When a developer pops out of nowhere and is doing better than the only other one known to exist

 

[D34DL1N3R]

Talk about overreacting. Vague hyperbole. No specifics. Both Nvidia and AMD cards have plenty of issues. If you don't like AMD because of irrational tribalism pride, just say it. Don't claim the cards don't work, because they do. I have used both Nvidia and AMD since I was little and they both have their pros and cons, brand by brand, but never have they been completely shot. Stick to Gigabyte, EVGA, XFX, Sapphire, and MSI.

Because I care what you think, why? Sorry that my opinions really bother you to the point of having to post that. Maybe the internet isn't the place for you.

Edit: When there's documented issues with AMD's entire 7900 series, which have gone unfixed for 6 years now.... yeah. I don't need to explain the specifics to you no matter how much you'd like me to. Don't like it? Tough. I especially have zero need to prove myself to a complete stranger online.

 

[ChibiMofo]

Talk about overreacting. Vague hyperbole. No specifics. Both Nvidia and AMD cards have plenty of issues. If you don't like AMD because of irrational tribalism pride, just say it. Don't claim the cards don't work, because they do. I have used both Nvidia and AMD since I was little and they both have their pros and cons, brand by brand, but never have they been completely shot. Stick to Gigabyte, EVGA, XFX, Sapphire, and MSI.

Do not pretend that AMD graphics card issues are not an order or magnitude larger than Nvidia's. There's a reason AMD can't charge the same price for the same level of performance. And there's a reason people who pay attention stopped buying anything but Nvidia cards years ago. Wanna save a few bucks and deal with ATI's drivers? Feel free. But don't come to a forum like this and try to say that both companies have issues as if they have them equally.
#rejected

 

[chaoskagami]

Do not pretend that AMD graphics card issues are not an order or magnitude larger than Nvidia's. There's a reason AMD can't charge the same price for the same level of performance. And there's a reason people who pay attention stopped buying anything but Nvidia cards years ago. Wanna save a few bucks and deal with ATI's drivers? Feel free. But don't come to a forum like this and try to say that both companies have issues as if they have them equally.
#rejected

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.