PS3 Emulator RPCS3 Launches New Roadmap and Database

The developer of PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 has launched a new website for the software, which includes a roadmap for future revisions and a list of compatible games. Despite being in development since 2011, it is only recently that RPCS3 has been able to fully emulate games – the first being Dead Space Extraction, last year – and the list of compatible games has grown since.

The list of 39 playable games includes Catherine, Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA F, Hitman: Silent Assassin, Hotline Miami, Metal Slug 3, The Revenge of Shinobi, and Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown.

The RPCS3 roadmap (available in full below) includes a series of short term, medium term, and long term goals, plus fixes for developers, such as implementation of PS3 firmware installers, hardware acceleration for decryption, support for mics, cameras, and other USB peripherals, plus booting games from original game discs.

Roadmap:

Short term goals

• Implement PS3 firmware installer. Users only need to provide correct PS3UPDAT.PUP file and it will be automatically unpacked into /dev_flash.
• Implement decryption on the fly. No more temporary files and additional steps. This affects, for example, EBOOT, SELF, SPRX, EDAT, and MSELF embedded files.
• Implement SDAT decryption. No need to decrypt them manually. Currently some games may silently fail to boot.
• New “Automatic LLE configuration” option (enabled by default). This will pick the most appropriate system modules (SPRX files) for a particular PS3 executable. It may be hard to pick them manually.
• Cache compiled LLVM modules. You shouldn’t recompile the same executable twice.
• Configure Travis to automatically upload Linux binaries on GitHub.
• Implement priority-based scheduler for PPU threads. This is an important core change, it will fix various crashes and freezes.
• Investigate early crashes on Linux.
• Start to improve compatibility by fixing bugs and missing functionality.

Medium term goals

• Enable hardware acceleration for decryption (AES-NI).
• Improve audio and video decoders for better speed and compatibility.
• Implement MSELF support without intermediate files. Currently it doesn’t work at all. Depends on “decryption on the fly” task.
• Improve controller support. This includes emulated controllers (with mouse or keyboard) and real controllers as well.
• Enable Vulkan graphic renderer for Linux.
• Add low-latency ASIO audio backend for Windows. With ASIO4ALL, it will work great on most modern hardware.
• Add core audio backend for Linux.
• Implement LLVM recompiler backend for SPU. This is actually a tremendous amount of work to make it useful, but it will also give the very important speed improvement (unless the SPU is not used at all).
• Improve LLVM flexibility. For example, it could scan game folder for all executables and SPRX modules and recompile them ahead of time.
• Implement PPU executable chain-loading.
• Improve solution structure, move and rename some files.
• Improve SPRX loading and unloading. This increases compatibility a lot.
• Implement missing syscalls. Allow to LLE more system modules.
• Write automatic tests to minimize bugs.
• Implement savedata manager. Currently it doesn’t have user interface.
• GUI: Use Qt instead of wxWidgets.
• Implement precise PPU interpreter.

Long term goals

• Support booting from original game discs.
• Implement user manager.
• Support mic, camera, USB peripherals, etc.
• Implement network functionality.
• Implement every system module in the emulator. This will allow the emulator to work without the PS3 firmware.
• Continue to improve speed, accuracy, and compatibility. This is a never-ending goal.

For developers

• Fix undefined behaviour in bf_t (signed shift).
• Implement MFC_DMA_TAG_CMD_STALL_NOTIFY_EVENT and other SPU events.
• Return error_code from syscalls and functions to enable error reporting.
• Improve embedded debugging tools (CPU, RSX, Kernel Explorer).
• Implement simple thread pool (Thread.cpp)

RPCS3 can be downloaded here.