this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
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Also, it's not like most or all of these exclusives won't eventually be in emulation territory.
PS4 is 13 years old and a tiny fraction of its games are considered "playable" in emulators so far.
Each generation has been exponentially more challenging to emulate than the previous, so don't hold your breath for reliable PS5 emulation.
shadPS4 Initial release September 29, 2023; 2 years ago.
Not really. PS4 is easier to emulate than PS3, if you are on x86 PC hardware. The development just didn't have as much time as PS3 yet, but its not exponentially more challenging than PS3. PS5 is basically a PC, so emulating games wouldn't be THAT hard. Like with PS4, they don't need to emulate everything of the CPU (if you are playing on PC).
You're totally right, it's just x86 so it'll be easy. That's why 13 years later they made so much progress on PS4 emulation.
/s
Your assumption is that they developed the PS4 emulator 13 straight hardcore. There are systems that are harder to emulate, just because it is more demanding and much more complex like PS3. It needed loots of time and efforts to be on this level of RPCS3 emulating PS3. On the other hand, the developers of shadPS4 made progress very quick once they started fully developing the project. And you don't even have to have a huge PC, because lots of the x86 instructions can be reused on your PC without emulating the whole thing. That's what it means its the same architecture, it requires less resources to run than emulating it in full.
Before getting sarcastic, you should inform yourself about topics you are arguing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShadPS4
You seem to be suggesting that the release date of a single emulator is the starting point? We're not supposed to count the prior years? No one tried before that? There's no prior art that people can build on?
Lots of projects started and were abandoned. A brief search and I can find at least 2 public projects started over 5 years ago, and many more abandoned efforts.
Those emulators work differently (shadPS4 doesn't emulate the entire CPU) and they were nowwhere near in a usable state. shadPS4 didn't took the work of these prior emulators, its done from scratch. At this point, you just put random arguments without proof. This is not a situation like Switch emulators where they just take prior work and keep working on it. shadPS4 was not 13 years in development. 2 years ago at launch it didn't even launch a game. They made fast progress in short amount of time. And because the hardware is not emulated fully, you can run it in a relatively "weak" hardware given what its emulated.
Your previous argument that each generation is exponential harder to emulate is nonsense. That's my point. Some hardware and generations are much harder than their successors, relatively speaking. PS5 emulation is not that far off from PS4, as the hardware is extremely similar (just stronger, like newer PC is stronger). Compared to previous generation of PS3 which was massively different.
Really? I've observed it being less challenging. People have more experience, the talent pool is larger, the tools are better, and the hardware is closer to PC hardware to begin with.
Also PS4 is x86, not some weird proprietary BS like PS3 was, and look how far that's come!