Talk:PlayStation 4 emulators

The PS4's GPU is not secretive. In fact there are info on it from AMD themselves, specifically the Southern Islands architecture for the 7xxx series Radeon GPUs that would be almost exact like PS4's. There a team that works on this on GitHub but they have a long ways to go before its properly emulater

Uh. If you think information on the page is less accurate than it could be, add to it. No need to ask whether that's okay. Murrigan (talk) 19:04, 31 January 2015 (EST)

Why does x86 architecture even need to be emulated on PCs which are already x86 to begin with?

I get that the x86 architecture is huge so even though it is well documented it would be difficult to emulate, but since PCs are already x86 anyway, why is there even a need to? Shouldn't all that needs to be emulated is the Orbis OS or whatever? And the Orbis OS is based on FreeBSD which is open source, so it would seem to me that this should be very easy to sort out if people would just approach this the easy way instead of trying to emulate an entire architecture which there is no need to do because PC is already that architecture anyway. And if I'm wrong then please tell me the reason why I'm wrong because I would like to know.

I was in the process of rewriting the page before, but I'm just gonna share this early. Fail0verflow discovered the "secondary processor" is actually the primary system (and even they are confused as hell about Sony's design). The PS4 is just an ARM system-on-a-chip that forwards games to run directly on the x86 processor and graphics card. I don't have a link to their presentation on it but it should still be on their website, of course. That means for proper PS4 emulation, you would need to "fake" a game's computer on top of a faked operating system's computer. This writeup from the VirtualBox team explains how they handle hardware abstraction on x86, explaining why virtualized software can be almost as fast as native software sometimes.