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Emulation is something we’re heavily invested in, with entire projects in the works around either providing you with the perfect machines or keeping tabs on it – like with our three pages dedicated to Dreamcast Emulators.
While the current line of consoles are now seeing their games just release all across the shop – rendering emulation for them a non-issue – the last generation still has a few titles that aren’t available on PC yet. PS4 games like 13 Sentinels, God of War HD collections and The Last of Us remain trapped, while on Xbox One, Halo 5 is notably missing from any PC.
Work on getting these consoles emulation ready is far from done, even with the similar architectures to a PC introduced by moving both consoles to x86 development, but shifting the games over to emulation is an arduous task. Just look at PS3 emulation, which has only just gotten to a good state recently.
Spine is being developed on Linux, as the developer – devofspine – uses that as their main machine. It also lines up with some things on both the PS4’s operating system and Linux both being UNIX based.
There’s a compatibility list as well, but while it lists a lot of games as having ‘in game’ compatibility, this isn’t exactly accurate. This mostly indicates that the game will load further than the introduction and actually into the game. However, a few videos online have pointed out that things like Persona 5, don’t display right and Dark Souls Remastered simply loads a blank screen with the user interface overlapped.
Even 2D games like Shovel Knight load with big blocky artefacts, but the proof that this does work is right there, as lower-end games like Jetpack Joyride runs smoothly and introductions, like in Persona 5, work perfectly.
There’s a lot of work to do, but you can download and test it yourself right now. We’d recommend using POP!_OS, but maybe don’t run it on the Raspberry Pi as spoken about in the article linked!