Orbital
| Developer(s) | AlexAltea & Orbital community |
|---|---|
| Latest version | N/A |
| Active | Yes |
| Platform(s) | Windows, Linux |
| Architecture(s) | x86_64 |
| Emulates | PlayStation 4 |
| Website | phi.nz/Orbital |
| Support ($) | Patreon |
| License | MIT License |
| Source code | GitHub |
Orbital is a virtualization-based PlayStation 4 emulator for Windows and Linux that is under heavy development. It can only boot the firmware. Do not expect to play commercial games with it yet. It is also open-source and is a low-level emulator
Overview
Future plans for the emulator can be found at the Roadmap page.
The lead developer, Alexandro Sanchez (AKA 'AlexAltea'), started working on the Orbital program the day he launched it publicly on GitHub on October 29, 2017. On 18 March, 2019, AlexAltea revealed on Twitter that Orbital was able to boot into Safe Mode from PS4 5.xx kernels on PC, with graphical output.
According to AlexAltea, Orbital relies on hardware-accelerated virtualization, not emulation, so it yields near-native performance. If anything, there could be bottlenecks in GPU rendering, e.g. due to UMA, but he had been working on ways to reduce overhead there. Orbital uses SPIR-V for hardware-accelerated virtualization - it is a low-level shader language used in the Vulkan graphics API. The program is driving graphical output by fully emulating the AMD GPU via the Vulkan backend and recompiling GCN bytecode to SPIR-V.
External links
- Official Discord channel for Orbital
- Twitter (Lead programmer AlexAltea)
