"It is impossible." That's what many think when someone announces the development of an emulator for a latest-generation console. But if we've learned anything in recent years, it's not an impossible task—just extremely difficult. The initial steps are slow, problematic, and chaotic, however, the end goal makes it all worthwhile. On that long road is GPCS4, a PlayStation 4 emulator. In the last few hours, its developers confirmed the execution of the first commercial title, We Are Doomed. The game is very basic, and its framerate practically doesn't exist… but it's heading in the right direction.
With the adoption of the x86 architecture by the latest generation of consoles (a detail that turns them almost into PCs), many speculate about the possibility of seeing a greater number of "exclusive" titles running on traditional computers. In fact, we've noticed an important number of new ports, such as the games made by Quantic Dream (Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, Detroit: Become Human) and Death Stranding, whose build for Windows will come out before the end of the year… but the rest will have to come to us through emulation.
The PlayStation 4 has attracted the interest of many developers, although there is also the problem of fakes. Only Orbital has shown a certain level of progress, and there are still doubts about the situation of Spine for Linux, but today we have GPCS4, which has just shared very important news: the execution of its first commercial game.
The title in question is We Are Doomed, one of the most simple for the PlayStation 4 in terms of graphics, but we must be realistic. With a framerate of two frames per second, absence of audio and problems in the emulation of the gamepad, We Are Doomed is not in conditions to be played. It is barely a technical demo, an evaluation that helps us visualize the progress of GPCS4. There are many optimizations ahead, and with them perhaps we will see a reduction in hardware requirements (this demo uses an i7-8700k, 32 GB of RAM and an RTX 2080 Super).
Another objective for GPCS4 and PlayStation 4 emulation in general is to find a "reference game" that allows accelerating its progress. The Pokémon series was fundamental for Game Boy emulators. Super Mario 64 fed all Nintendo 64 emulators. The first Gran Turismo did their thing with PS1, and Breath of the Wild allowed Cemu's development to explode. What PS4 games can we consider indispensable? God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Uncharted 4, Bloodborne? Am I forgetting any? Leave a comment!
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