Party time in Yharnam: How Bloodborne emulation has gotten so much better in just the last 2 months
Booting Bloodborne "doesn't require any hacks anymore," a ShadPS4 developer tells Read Only Memo, though there's still a whole lot of work to done.
The story in emulation right now is Bloodborne.
There's no competition — it doesn't get bigger or more exciting than a decade-long console exclusive suddenly showing signs of life and playability on another platform. With YouTube vids aflyin' showing Bloodborne running on PC, and seemingly better every day, I had to follow up with the ShadPS4 crew to find out a bit more about their progress. That's our main focus this issue, and I'm already late getting today's ROM out the door, so I'll be keeping this intro brief!
In a quick hit of "holy crap" news, it looks like one of Taki Udon's upcoming projects is a PS1-themed FPGA console. If you didn't get a MiSTer Pie order in the first batch, keep an eye out for the next round to go on sale in early October, potentially before our next issue of ROM.
Rolling right along: While this has nothing to do with emulation, I have to share the next game I'm excited to play on my Playdate, the pitch perfect 1-bit homage to Japanese train game Densha de Go! Have you ever seen anything as beautiful as Zero Zero Perfect Stop?
If you've never played Densha de Go!, the gist is you control the acceleration and braking of a commuter or subway train in something that falls between arcade and simulation; the original game demands near perfection in where and how you come to a stop at each station and is absolutely brutal on a mistake of mere meters, but I prefer its low poly PS1 style to the "better" graphics of the later PS2 and beyond entries. Zero Zero Perfect Stop is as low fi as you can get, and I have to say I think the presentation translates incredibly well to the dithered black & white look. If you've played it yourself, let me know!
Now one last bit of good vibes news before we get down to business: preservation org Hit Save has sponsored SquirrelJME, the in-progress emulator for mobile Java games (with a particular focus on Japanese keitai!). Make sure you're following RockmanCosmo for a stream of exciting wins around Japanese phone game preservation:
In an amazing turn of events, @YuviApp has preserved the ENTIRETY of Professor Layton and the Mansion of the Deathly Mirror! All six chapters were found on a junk F906i. Previously, we only had the first three chapters. An English translation will happen in due time! (1/3)
— RockmanCosmo (@rockmancosmo.bsky.social) 2024-09-13T16:17:05.481Z
SquirrelJME isn't quite up to playing games yet, but it's getting there; the keitai community is preserving games at an impressive clip, and while emulation of them currently still relies on old SDK emulators from 20 years ago, the scene tools are definitely catching up. By the time they track down a complete copy of Before Crisis: Final Fantasy 7, maybe we'll be ready for it!!
The Big Two
1. Bloodborne emulation is already improving by leaps and bounds
Holy Yharnoli, I'm playing Bloodborne on a computer.
Okay, I'm sort of playing Bloodborne on a computer. Briefly. It's crashing constantly, sound barely works, the lighting is definitely jacked up and there are more problems besides, but the fact it works as well as it does is simply staggering.
Just two months ago in ROM I wrote about the very beginnings of Bloodborne being playable in ShadPS4; at the time you couldn't even get past character creation. But now with enough custom hacks and patches and two incredibly fast-paced months of emulator improvements, it's beginning to resemble an actual functioning video game. I wrote about the gist of playing Bloodborne for the day job this week:
Wes Fenlon
As I said there, this really isn't a "good" experience yet and requires a ton of fiddly setup that isn't really worth trying yourself unless you want to be on the absolute bleeding edge. But how the heck did ShadPS4 progress so far, so quickly?
"The biggest area [of improvement] has definitely been GPU emulation and it's what most people will notice," says one of ShadPS4's main contributors, TheTurtle. "Bloodborne specifically is not very hard to boot system-wise, doesn't use any special OS functions that are difficult to translate."
I asked TheTurtle to break down the process of bringing Bloodborne from barely bootable to kinda playable in in just two months. The short version is that while there's still tons to do to emulate the PS4 as a whole, as with, say, Cemu back when Zelda: Breath of the Wild came out, they knew where the audience would most want them to focus their attention.
"Booting the game doesn't require any hacks anymore. It did in the beginning and that is why there was a separate branch named bb-hacks just for it. We understood the hype around the game and wanted to offer the opportunity for adventurous folk to test it but also keep the main branch clean. Slowy as more of the game's requirements were properly implemented the branch was retired and now you can boot the game from main branch. Now patches are mostly limited to fixing up visual issues with the game such as overexposed lighting and missing particle effects. Those will be fixed in the emulator eventually however, making most of these mods redudant."
Is that going to happen just as quickly over the next two months, though? Unlikely. Bloodborne's main graphical issues in the emulator are broken lighting and vertex explosions, both of which "are quite hard to solve."
"There isn't a specific unfinished part of the emulator we can point to, but rather it's bugs in the existing GPU emulation that are hard to track," TheTurtle says.
Likewise ShadPS4's emulation of the PS4 CPU is far from finished; the expect some accuracy improvements will help resolve "various oddball issues" in the future (and not specific to Bloodborne). This is tough, complicated work we're not going to dig into today, but I have a feeling there will be many more opportunities down the road.
The last two months have brought the ShadPS4 team a whole lot of attention, which TheTurtle says has been exciting and stressful at the same time. Moderating a Discord server that now has thousands of members is a challenge, and of course the interest in Bloodborne is borderline rabid. "Certain Twitter/YouTube accounts don't help the situation as they proclaim the game to be 'almost done' or giving random ETAs like 'it'll be ready in 2 weeks,'" TheTurtle says. "So people come expecting a flawless experience and they don't get that."
Don't join ShadPS4's Discord server expecting a flawless experience anytime soon, and definitely don't go in asking for a copy of the game — you'll have to dump it yourself! Now's the time to get prepared, because playable Bloodborne is coming. The GOTY edition is quite affordable on eBay, just sayin'.
I'll leave you with the latest bleeding edge video from ShadPS4 dev George Moralis, showing a boss fight that is clearly still not perfect, but shockingly impressive compared to where we were back in July. The next few months are going to be real, real fun.
2. RPCS3's netplay now supports a bunch more games
Some very cool news out of RPCS3 this week: it's not possible to play a number of earlier PS3 games online with matchmaking. This works via RPCN (which I wrote about a bit at PC Gamer as well), a matchmaking server for the PS3 emulator. RPCN basically replicates Sony's implementation of PSN matchmaking, which some but by no means all PS3 games used. This week's RPCN update to version 1.3 is actually implementing an older set of PSN APIs that it didn't yet support.
"There are 2 sets of API used by games, sceNpMatching and sceNpMatching2. Matching was the original API and then it was deprecated in favour of Matching2," developer GalCiv told me. "Matching2 is also a lot more complex than Matching in general but most games use Matching2 so I started by implementing it. ... Matching was still was a chunky thing to implement for very few games(like a dozen games use that old API?) Interestingly Ridge Racer 7 used even older API that no other game uses, I think they may have worked directly with Sony to implement a first draft of the matchmaking API. Thankfully it mostly matched 1:1 with Matching API with a few exceptions."
Since this update adds support for the older API, the list of games it t enables isn't huge, but it's still got some notable names on it:
- Armored Core 4
- Armored Core: For Answer
- Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit
- OutRun Online Arcade
- Ridge Racer 7
- Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD
- Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix
- Tekken 5 Dark Resurrection
- The Punisher: No Mercy
- Top Spin 3
- Wangan Midnight
GalCiv says that invitations for the Matching API are still to come, as well as some features to support quickmatching. "I think Battle Fantasia does need invites to work, that was the only Matching game that refused to work afaik," they told me.
And in the future they might work on a feature to better help users understand the port forwarding needed to ensure RPCN's peer-to-peer networking is set up correctly. But in the meantime, check out RPCN if any of the above games, or anything on the RPCN Compatibility list — which includes games with custom private servers including Metal Gear Online 2 and, far more importantly, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. See you On Line. 💻
Patching In
86Box gets some polish – I haven't features this PC emulator in ROM, but it's cool as heck, running chips from the '80s to the early 2000s with all sorts of Sound Blasters and the like. Its latest update in early September includes a buncha bugfixes. Give it a shot next time you need a virtual computer.
Ryujinx gets SSAA – Ryujinx keeps on trucking with updates, even though it hasn't been publishing progress reports since the Yuzu lawsuit. Some recent patches have fixed missing reflections and crashes in Lollipop Chainsaw Repop, a big performance update for Castlevania Dominus Collection, and some graphical fixes in Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom on AMD RDNA 3 cards. The most significant update, though, is support for supersampled anti-aliasing, which should make for some mighty sharp images if you can manage to render games at ~4x res.
Flycast Dojo trains in Lua – This netplay-focused fork of Flycast can now use Lua scripts to play back inputs recorded in training mode, which sounds super useful for anyone seriously spending time in the lab in Soul Calibur or CvSNK2.
Core Report
Analogue Pocket cores get display mode support – The NES core, SNES core, and PC Engine cores from Agg23 have all been updates to support the latest Analogue Pocket firmware update, which added a buncha display mode options for OpenFPGA.
MiSTer's Saturn core keeps on keepin' on – The Saturn core has been particularly active lately, adding mouse support, some accuracy fixes, and regressions for X-Men vs. Street Fighter, Sega Rally Championship, and Battle Garegga.
Translation Station
I didn't find much of interest going on for the Translation Station this issue, so instead I'd like to highlight that Natsu-Mon: 20th Century Summer Kid, the modern successor to Boku no Natsuyasumi, is currently more than 50% off on Steam despite only releasing a few weeks ago. Support this official localization of a great game and series!
Good pixels
Playing Bloodborne on PC is not yet a very good experience, but you know what is a good experience? That's right: the BloodbornePSX demake. What a thing of beauty.
Images via LWMedia
