RPCS3 is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

video game console emulator A video game console emulator is a type of emulator that allows a computing device to emulate a video game console's hardware and play its games on the emulating platform. More often than not, emulators carry additional features that surpass ...

and

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for the

Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...

PlayStation 3 The PlayStation 3 (PS3) is a home video game console developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment. The successor to the PlayStation 2, it is part of the PlayStation brand of consoles. It was first released on Novemb ...

that runs on

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and

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

operating systems, allowing PlayStation 3 games and software to be played and debugged on a

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. It is being developed in the C++ programming language targeting

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CPUs and features

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and

Vulkan Vulkan is a low- overhead, cross-platform API, open standard for 3D graphics and computing. Vulkan targets high-performance real-time 3D graphics applications, such as video games and interactive media. Vulkan is intended to offer higher perfor ...

as its backend renderers. As of December 26, 2022, the emulator is able to run all commercially-released PS3 games, at least to some extent.

Development

Despite the general idea that the complexity of the PlayStation 2's

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would prevent it from being emulated, RPCS3 released on May 23, 2011, by programmers DH and Hykem as a working emulator. The developers initially hosted the project on

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and eventually moved it to

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on August 27, 2013. The emulator was first able to successfully run simple homebrew projects in September 2011 and got its first public release in June 2012 as v0.0.0.2. On February 9, 2017, RPCS3 received its first implementation of a PPE thread scheduler, enhancing its emulation of the many-core Cell microprocessor. On February 16, 2017, RPCS3 gained the ability to install official PlayStation 3 firmware directly to its core file system. In May 2017, it was reported that the implementation of the Vulkan graphics API had shown some performance improvements approaching 400%, pushing several games into "playable" status. In July 2020, the developers of RPCS3 implemented save states into the emulator. This feature had previously been considered infeasible due to technical limitations.

Requirements

As of August 18, 2022, the emulator requires a 64-bit version of

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or later, a modern

distribution,

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or later, or a modern BSD distribution. The PC must have at least 4 GB of

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, 8 GB recommended, an

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and a

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...

supporting one of the supported graphics APIs:

4.3 or greater, or

, the latter being recommended. Apart from the game itself to be run, the emulator requires the PlayStation 3's

firmware In computing, firmware is a specific class of computer software that provides the low-level control for a device's specific hardware. Firmware, such as the BIOS of a personal computer, may contain basic functions of a device, and may provide h ...

, which can be downloaded from Sony's official website.

Atlus DMCA takedown notice

RPCS3 received significant media attention in April 2017 for its ability to emulate ''

Persona 5 is a 2016 role-playing video game developed by Atlus. It takes place in modern-day Tokyo and follows a high school student known by the pseudonym Joker who transfers to a new school after being falsely accused of assault and put on probation ...

'', achieving playability prior to the game's Western release date. In September 2017, ''

Persona A persona (plural personae or personas), depending on the context, is the public image of one's personality, the social role that one adopts, or simply a fictional character. The word derives from Latin, where it originally referred to a theatr ...

'' developer

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issued a DMCA takedown notice against RPCS3's

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page. The action was motivated by the Patreon page making frequent mentions on the emulator's progress on emulating ''Persona 5''. The demand, however, was settled by only removing all ''Persona 5'' references from the page.

References

{{Sony emulators Cross-platform software Free video game console emulators Free software programmed in C++ Free software projects Linux emulation software Software that uses Qt Sony emulators Windows emulation software

Development

Requirements

Atlus DMCA takedown notice

See also

References