Sooner or later it was going to happen. Someone would find a way to reproduce (to a certain extent) the workings of consoles that today seem out of reach. The path is complex, and legal threats are the order of the day (as always), but it will happen. In recent months, the project known as Orbital took its first steps toward becoming the first PlayStation 4 emulator compatible with PC. It's based on virtualization, there are no binaries, and the user must compile all the elements... but we still welcome it.
At the time they said it was impossible to emulate the original PlayStation. Not only did they emulate it, but we can build our own clones today. Then they repeated the same speech with the PlayStation 2. They also emulated it. And guess what happened with the PlayStation 3? Yes, they emulated it. Some developers take it as a personal challenge. Add to that a whole interested community, and the rest is history. Few examples are as compelling as what has happened with Dolphin and CEMU, emulators for GameCube, Wii, and Wii U. In fact, we've reached a point where fans pay developers monthly to continue their work, solving compatibility problems and improving performance. Now, projects are emerging that seek to 'attack' the latest generation of consoles head-on, and one of them is Orbital, the first PlayStation 4 emulator.
Orbital: The Road to a PlayStation 4 Emulator
Orbital is the work of Spanish security researcher and reverse engineering expert Alexandro Sánchez Bach. Orbital is based on virtualization, meaning the plan is to run the entire software stack of the PlayStation 4 on PC. Personally, I'd like to have something more to show besides the image above, but the truth is there's nothing. Calling Orbital 'experimental' is an understatement. Those interested will have to compile each of the main components (BIOS, GRUB, and QEMU) on their own, and even then, they won't have access to an interface or an ISO loader to run games. Orbital is very, very far from that.
If you're interested in helping, you basically can do it in two ways: contributing to the code, or donating a fixed sum of money via Patreon. The PlayStation 4's specifications are notable. In theory, the x86 architecture should make things easier, but there's a lot of custom hardware inside, and we can only say 'good luck' to any attempt to get official documentation. This will be reflected in Orbital's requirements, and with its current experimental state it already recommends 12 GB of RAM. Patience.
