You may have already heard of a PS4 emulator called Orbital making a fair amount of progress recently but, in the last few days, another one has appeared seemingly out of nowhere and grabbed everyone's attention by being the first publicly available PS4 emulator able to play commercial games. Spine was first unveiled by its developer (spinedev) on the /r/emulation subreddit with a video showing it running Mega Man Legacy Collection flawlessly. It was thought to be fake at first, partly for the limited amount of information surrounding it and also due to the developer's lack of reputation, however, an early build was released shortly after that proved the sceptics wrong.

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Spine takes a different approach from the already mentioned Orbital. The latter is a Low-Level Emulator (LLE) focused on mimicking the hardware's behaviour as accurately as possible to run software designed for the platform on another machine, while the former is a High-Level Emulator (HLE) which instead tries to recreate the original platform's functions to run the software on the host, thus trading off accuracy for performance in the process. Aside from the previously mentioned Mega Man title, Spine is also reportedly able to play another game with great results: We Are Doomed.

The emulator is still in early development and is available for Linux only at the time of writing. It's distributed as a standalone Flatpak package, with the only dependencies being GL and SDL2. No source code has been released yet.

Source
Discussion thread

 

[Reploid]

Wow, it emulates an emulator

 

[leon315]

Do we need a 500bucks I9900k and 500bucks 32gb ram to run this emulator?

 

[pasc]

*checks calendar* ... not april.

 

[hippy dave]

Spine takes a different approach from the already mentioned Orbital. The latter is a Low-Level Emulator (LLE) focused on mimicking the hardware's behaviour as accurately as possible to run software designed for the platform on another machine, while the latter is a High-Level Emulator (HLE) which instead tries to recreate the original platform's functions to run the software on the host, thus trading off accuracy for performance in the process.

Whoopsie. Good story tho ty.

 

[RattletraPM]

Whoopsie. Good story tho ty.

Heh...fixed ^^".

 

[D34DL1N3R]

Do we need a 500bucks I9900k and 500bucks 32gb ram to run this emulator?

You forgot about the $1,500 GPU.

 

[smf]

I want to see how well it runs on ps4 linux

 

[Owenge]

good shit!

 

[Rabbid4240]

Oh cool, it plays nes games.

 

[Deleted User]

Oh cool, it plays nes games.

To be fair the video shows newer games like stardew valley..

 

[leon315]

You forgot about the $1,500 GPU.

but lastest AMD gpu costs only 449 tho!

 

[Rabbid4240]

To be fair the video shows newer games like stardew valley..

As long as it plays music and nes games, I'm set.

 

[gnmmarechal]

Not bad, I'll take a look.

 

[D34DL1N3R]

but lastest AMD gpu costs only 449 tho!

I decided to give an AMD gpu a try with my last build. Nothing but problems. Never again. Problems that have been documented by plenty of people since it's release 6 yrs ago and have never been fixed in a single driver update. It's time for me to upgrade but it's not going to be AMD.

 

[Kubas_inko]

I would pay for anything to run PS4 games on PC. Just not for the PS4.

 

[digipimp75]

Forget this shit and release a new kernel exploit already!

 

[Deleted User]

Forget this shit and release a new kernel exploit already!

So entitled...

Comments like this are why people work in private or just don't release things publicly

 

[leon315]

I decided to give an AMD gpu a try with my last build. Nothing but problems. Never again. Problems that have been documented by plenty of people since it's release 6 yrs ago and have never been fixed in a single driver update. It's time for me to upgrade but it's not going to be AMD.

The one showed at E3 seems promising, if i ever build another pc, i would definitely get Ryzen cpu!

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

I saw this a couple days ago, super neat to see how different and quickly the progress can be with HLE vs LLE.