ShadPS4 ignites a Bloodborne brouhaha while PCSX2 powers up to 2.0

Wow. Wowowowow! It's been a whopper of a week for emulation news, the first in awhile where I've struggled to decide what the heck stories to lead with. Too much good stuff, too little time and space. There's a new stable version of PCSX2 after like four years! The budget MiSTer board wars are heating up! A hotly anticipated fan translation of a famously bad game! A jpeg of Bloodborne! In other words, it's time to break out a classic.

Someone get me some glue STAT.

For this issue I've got two interviews on the big topics, focusing on PCSX2's release and the buzz around emerging PlayStation 4 emulator ShadPS4. Is the time to emulate Bloodborne finally nigh?? (No, it's not nigh. But it's maybe nigher? We'll get into it.)

Before the big stories, let's touch on the latest incremental update in the $99 MiSTer saga. On Thursday, Taki Udon tweeted that his board will be going into mass production "this weekend" alongside a USB hub, analog IO board, and SDRAM. To quote Taki, this is what everything will cost:

• Board = under $99
• Board + 128MB RAM kit = under $115
• Board + 128MB RAM + USB hub + 9.2 analog IO = $145-$160 ( I'll know for sure in a few days)

If you've been following along with Taki's incremental updates, you'll know the board has gone through some small revisions to power, swapping the DC jack for a USB Type-C that can do 5-12V and some tweaking to USB headers. But all of a sudden it's not the only alternative to the now-clearly-overpriced DE10-Nano: there's another $99 board from Chinese manufacturer QMTech. Actually it's not all of a sudden — it's been known about for months and is here on Aliexpress — but it started getting some attention this week (hat tip to Lu's) that might make you say what the heck, should I get this one instead? No one's put the board through its paces so far, but my gut and this Reddit thread says this one ain't it. Still, it's great to have options, and we'll see soon if the enough if it's legit as a few folks in the MiSTer scene already have units headed their way to test.

One other bit of news I'd like to call out — the community of folks dedicated to preserving Japanese mobile games have scored a huge win recently by dumping a number of previously undumpable games, including Before Crisis: Final Fantasy 7, an episodic prequel that Square Enix has never made playable in any other form. Now before you get fully ❗❗ about that, we have to temper the accomplishment a bit: because of the way these games were downloaded and stored on the memory-limited phones of the time, they'd often overwrite the old data with each episode, so getting a "complete" dump of the game is unlikely if not impossible. There's also the challenge of the game doing network checks to server infrastructure that no longer exists.

But this is still a huge step forward; the community of hobby preservationists focused on keitai games have over the past year or so gone from not being able to dump the old phones at all due to various security measures to one smash success after another. So here's a little bit of Before Crisis, as a treat.

I'm excited to dive into this topic in-depth in a future issue when there's not quite so much happening, as it's only going to get more interesting as the preservation effort progresses. And with that I think it's time to get to the main events.

On with the news!

The Big Two

1. New PS4 emulator ShadPS4 can boot Bloodborne, but we ain't in Yharnam yet

It's been juuuuuust over a year since I featured RPCSX, the first PS4 emulator to make a splash thanks to the pedigree of its developers who'd previously worked on PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3. I've been keeping an eye on RPCSX and it is still in development, but not much seems to be happening, at least publicly. So a recent flurry of activity around another PlayStation 4 contender, ShadPS4, has made it the current bell of the ball.

ShadPS4 dropped a new build two weeks ago (I love that primary developer George Moralis titled the v0.1.0 release 'codename madeturtle') that includes a shader recompiler, noting "with this we have a lot of games that starts to work." Alongside madturtle he created a repository for game compatibility testing, and users have created more than 150 game entries already that reveal ShadPS4 can already play some games. Now, can it play them flawlessly? Definitely not. Most games currently do not even boot. A few are flagged as "ingame" meaning they can successfully get past the Start screen but aren't realistically playable. Steamworld Dig 2, for example, runs but with broken audio. Others run but the speed's off. Only a couple are tagged "playable," but quite a few of the games tagged "ingame" actually don't have major flaws listed. There probably are major flaws — these are quick notes, not exhaustive front-to-back testing details — but the exciting thing here is that there's clearly a working emulator here that can handle a range of actual commercial video games.

ShadPS4 dropped its very first build last September, though before that Moralis had been working on it since October of 2022. On March 23 of this year he published a new build to signifiy a special date: it was both his birthday and the 21st anniversary of the first release of PCSX2, which he founded. Moralis only worked on PCSX2 for the first three years of its now very long life, but he's also worked on PS1 and PSP emulators so the pedigree is most definitely there.

So does that mean we'll be playing Bloodborne on ShadPS4 any day now!? Take a deep breath and let the cooling realism of Moralis's words calm you.

"We had Bloodborne booting for some time now," Moralis told me, but the ShadPS4 team "wasn't really ready to uncover it yet." They decided to leave a bit of necessary code for the game to boot out of the emulator's public source, but when a user ferreted it out they knew they couldn't hide it anymore. That's when news broke of the game's title screen working in ShadPS4 — though it's not getting past the character creation screen. Moralis opted to show it off himself in a short video.

"We really didn't want for users to have great expectations on that yet since it is really still very WIP," he told me. "Our GPU engine needs a lot of work to get it ingame, As you can figure out this is one of the most advanced games on PS4. I can't predict time but you should know that we are working on that and making progress almost every day."

I don't envy the sudden weight of expectation from fans who think it's just a hop, skip and a jump to the game being fully playable, but the attention has had a positive side: it's drawn some more collaborators to ShadPS4 who could be a boon to development. There's still a shitload of work ahead, despite the PS4's design hewing closer to a PC than the PS3 did.

"They only advantage is the same architecture (x86-64)," Moralis said. "All the other aspects are quite challenging. PS4 has a custom AMD GPU, a lot of custom modules — services to emulate and quite little documentation."

As a point of example, Sonic Mania is one of the few games currently playable on ShadPS4, which Moralis said is down to it using "minimal" shaders and not requiring much from the PS4's GPU. It primarily draws on the CPU, which is why other PS4 emulators have also used it as an early test game. "We actually got it running with only 1 week of GPU coding," he said.

Running commercial games is definitely the goal for ShadPS4 — beyond the initial spark of a challenge, that drive to see can I do this? that drives so many emulator developers. The project Github is currently a flurry of activity, and Moralis stressed he isn't in it alone, with contributors nullptr and TheTurtle being particularly active this year. We're still probably a couple years away from a properly playable version of a game like Bloodborne even if things go well, but things are moving. The latest announcement in the Discord from Moralis, which has seen a huge influx of users this week, is a reminder to keep calm and carry on.

Although you are already figured out that there is "some" progress on bloodborne , we should mention that his is highly WIP and not top priority atm. Team is working hard to stabilize emulator and then more progress will come. So be polite to the team and thank you for your support

2. PCSX2's 2.0 arrives after 4 years, introduces Native Scaling

🎉 Last September I interviewed veteran PCSX2 dev Refraction and gave ROM readers a preview of what was to come in the first stable release of the emulator in 3+ years, and now it's finally here! If you're a frequent PCSX2 user, this release won't actually feel that monumental; that's because the nightly build of the emulator is pretty much the go-to, so most of the updates bundled up in this big numbered release have actually been available for some time. Still, if you haven't used the emulator in a bit, it's worth reading this monster of a blog post that highlights the many, many feature additions over the last few years:

• Slick new controller-friendly / big screen UI
• Revamped controller input support / mapping
• Per-game settings config options in addition to global settings
• A library of automatic game fixes
• Return of MacOS support
• New patches UI and patch database
• New more powerful debug tools
• New built-in video capture
• Performance and compatibility improvements galore
• Native scaling technique to defeat ghosting issues

It's a whole hell of a lot of stuff if you haven't been been using the emulator in recent years, but even if you're a frequent user there's some new tech to get excited about in that list. The big one is native scaling, which is hot off the presses. I talked to Refraction about what this new feature entails — he collaborated on it with Duckstation dev Stenzek (also a regular PCSX2 contributor) to defeat one of PCSX2's most glaring issues when trying to play games at higher internal resolutions. Say you set PCSX2 to render at 4x or 6x internal res for your snazzy 4K monitor. The 3D models and environments will typically scale up quite well, and you can even use hi-res texture mods to pretty up the textures. But the way some games apply bloom lighting effects gets totally screwed up at those high resolutions, creating a messy "ghosting" effect.

"A lot of games will downscale the image using bilinear filtering in order to create a smudgy 'bloom' effect, often modulating it on the brighter parts of the scene, then scale it back up, sometimes with some extra intensity to give the scene a bit more of a glow," Refraction explained. "The problem we had, when you are upscaling in the emulator, the sampling range of the bilinear filtering was still only 4 neighbouring pixels for each pixel, so it doesn't really sample to the same degree."

The fix they concocted was to essentially add a downscaling step into the process to fix the sampling math! We're both upscaling and downscaling here. Which sounds confusing, but makes total sense when you get it. Refraction breaks it down:

If you scaled that 4K (for argument's sake lets say thats 6x native) image you're basically sampling the same pixel that you're reading from. The sampling area exponentially increases as where in native you'd read a pixel and the neighbouring ones, in 6x you basically need to sample 12 pixels in each direction and everything in between... because of the upscale, every 1 pixel now becomes 6x6 pixels worth of space when compared to native.

It's an exponentially huge increase in processing, and emulating this effect would be pretty slow, and may not be very beneficial/faithful to the original intended effect. Couple this with the fact that if you do bilinear sampling in hardware on the GPU (which is what we do), it will only sample the neighbouring 1 pixel, much like native resolution expects. So the bloom effect gets all but eradicated, plus it causes some positioning problems due to how it samples it.

What native scaling does is makes a copy of that image which is at 6x native, then downscales it to a native resolution. Then it does the draw/sampling based upon that native resolution copy... In most cases you don't really notice anything strange or low resolution, which was frankly a bonus!"

This bloom issue impacted some pretty notable PS2 games including Devil May Cry 3, Valkyrie Profile 2, and the Ratchet & Clank and Burnout games. And more! "Some games like Monster House and Indiana Jones and the Emperors Tomb just couldn't look right with traditional fixes, where this cleaned it right up," Refraction said. The best part is that this is done automatically for games where the issue is present, so there's nothing you have to do to apply it.

That now goes for a lot of PCSX2's other fixes as well, as there's a lot of fiddly stuff with unique graphical effects. "With 2.0 a lot of stuff now works which previously didn't, and any upscaling fixes, at least for the more popular games, are being automatically applied, so nobody needs to spend ages fiddling around."

In terms of manual fixes, though, using those has also now become a much, much nicer experience. In the old days you could copy/paste a code, or a range of codes, into a "patch" for the emulator to apply something like a widescreen hack or 60 fps unlock; this basically meant having to copy someone's hex edit off a forum post and paste it in, and applying multiple hacks was going to be a confusing pain if you weren't used to looking at code. PCSX2's UI can now interpret these patches and break them out into a nice interface, so you just get some checkboxes to enable or disable what you want.

These patches now also live in a Github repository and will be auto-downloaded into the emulator, so you don't have to go hunting for them. This only applies to the cream of the crop that the PCSX2 team has curated, so there might be more obscure patches out there for a game you want to hunt down. But when it comes to basic stuff like just wanting widescreen or 60 fps support, it'll likely be at your fingertips.

Special thanks to Refraction for explaining the new native scaling technique, and for spending 19 years contributing to PCSX2's development. He's now stepping back from the project to focus on other things, but PCSX2 is certainly still in good hands, with many contributors around to keep it going. Hats off to Refraction for one hell of a run!

Patching In

Dolphin enters a new release era and also gets RetroAchievements – A loooong time coming, Dolphin has finally left the "5.0 era" of its last stable release to adopt a new rolling release scheme. There was really no reason to stick to Dolphin's stable build, as all of the emulator's progress over the last few years has been in the daily builds, but this still marks a major moment in the emulator's history and that's worth some major celebration. And now for a pretty significant new feature: RetroAchievements support! Look for the new build with Achievements enabled to drop around 5 pm EST on Monday, July 15.

Dolphin contributor JMC4789 tells me the implementation will be comparable to PCSX2's. The standalone PC build of Dolphin (meaning no Android or Libretro support) will have a new Achievements tab where you can login to a RetroAchievements account. Roughly 100 games will be supported at launch, all from the GameCube library. Support for more (and presumably the Wii, eventually) will follow over time. "It's going to have leaderboards, achievements, and a cool launch event where people are challenged to beat (get the 'beat the game achievement') or master (all achievements) on games," JMC said.

If F-Zero GX is on there, I'm prepared to cry.

Delta 1.6 goes multi-game on iPad – Multi-system iOS emulator Delta, which has racked up some 10 million users since its launch a couple months ago, just released a major update including proper iPad OS support. A few new perks: Split view on iPad for multiple games, no required BIOS files for melonDS, and "seamlessly" handing off the app between a phone and tablet. Unfortunately the update was rejected by Apple for the regular app store, so if you're not on the EU Alt store, it's may be a wait.

SNES9x is back!? – The Super Nintendo emulator of my youth is still truckin'. Its last release was a year ago, though its last major release was way back in 2019. This one isn't a biggie, but fixes a spread of bugs. I may be more of a bsnes guy these days, but it warms my heart to see old reliable still being improved 20+ years later.

Lime3DS can stream DLC now – Cool 3DS tool ArticBase lets you stream games from a console to an emulator, and a recent update to Artic (also integrated to Lime3DS) adds support for DLC too.

Core Report

So anyway, I started blasting – Jotego's upcoming core for Laser Ghost, a Sega light gun shooter, now supports light guns! It's not out yet, but when it is, if you have a CRT you'll be able to play it as god / Segata Sanshiro intended.

MAME preps its Dempsey Roll – MAME just added Hajime no Ippo: The Fighting Round 2 boxing game to its list of 'not working' machines. So nothing playable yet, but that's the first step towards it eventually working! By the way — watch Hajime no Ippo.

Translation Station

Ancient Roman, the "we have FF7 at home" of PS1 RPGs, is finally here! – I really want to give this translation its proper due with more words than a little paragraph here, so look for that in an upcoming ROM. In the meantime, enjoy this FAQ that will serve as your guide through the game, in which "broken music, laggy sound effects, bizarre polygonal art, and a rushed story all await you in this must-be-experienced masterpiece."

Starvin' spooks – It wasn't on my radar that PS2 survival horror game Hungry Ghosts was getting a fan translation, but there is indeed one in progress! Here's a recent set of tweets going over an updated (and much improved) font.

Rygar re-translated – I had no idea that in coming west Rygar had some notable differences from the Japanese release, including a new soundtrack and "heavily" changed localization. This patch is meant to more closely mirror the Japanese release, using its soundtrack, logo and a new script that "takes a middle ground between the official English localization and the original Japanese."

Good pixels

With Dolphin and PCSX2 both releasing major milestone stable builds, I dipped into the media channels on each emulator's Discord and grabbed some fun screenshots from the communities. Credits for the screenshotters below!

Until next time. 💽

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