Homebrew releases for the PlayStation 4 are far and few between but this time, we got something pretty cool which is a PlayStation 1 emulator thanks to Znullptr. Other than that, we’ll also be looking at an update to ElevenMPV which is the best way to enjoy music on the PSVita!

PS4 Release: PCSX-R port released for hacked PS4 consoles letting you play PS1 games!

In May, Znullptr (David Miller) was working on porting various emulators to the PlayStation 4 thus beefing up its homebrew lineup which makes hacking the console more appealing.

Thanks to this PCSX-R port, you can play many PS1 games on your PS4 but unfortunately, you can’t save until someone fixes it… (Image Source)

Among emulators that were being worked on, we find PCSX-R (PS1), Yabause (Saturn), Blast-Em (Genesis), Reicast (Dreamcast) and mGBA (GB/GBC/GBA). Unfortunately, he stopped working on these emulators earlier this month as he switched focus to developing a usermode virtualizer for the PlayStation 4 but PKGs for Yabuase, Reicast and mGBA eventually surfaced online.

Now, a PKG of PCSX-R for the PS4 has surfaced thanks to Markus95 which means that you can finally emulate PlayStation 1 games on a hacked PlayStation 4 without booting into Linux. However, the emulator isn’t 100% finished and has some bugs such as broken save functionality, cutscenes lagging and sound not functioning properly. Furthermore, you can only load a single ROM at a time so you have to rename the “game.bin” file that the emulator uses in order to play different games.

Instructions for using it are as follows:

• Install PSX.pkg
• Copy your ROM, which must be in BIN format, to a pendrive and name it “game.bin”
• Copy memcard.mcr to data/pcsxr/ via FTP although this isn’t really needed as saving doesn’t work
• Open the PCSX-R application from the PS4’s menu and enjoy!

To grab the emulator’s PKG, check out this link to Logic-Sunrise’s article about it and scroll to the bottom. A video of the emulator in action can be accessed here.

Thanks to Games And Consoles for providing an Italian translation of Logic-Sunrise’s article (original release article) was in French

PSVita Release: ElevenMPV 2.1.0 released with various fixes and access to all directories

If you have a PSVita, like listening to music, want to use a dedicated music playing app and don’t fancy using QCMA to use the stock music player then your best choice is Joel16’s ElevenMPV.

This CyanogenMod/LineageOS-inspired homebrew music player supports playing a whole variety of music formats (MP3/WAV/FLAC/OGG and more) from any directory in storage and also comes with a whole slew of features including metadata support, a shuffle function and more!

ElevenMPV is an indirect port of the CyanogenMod/LineageOS Eleven Music Player which is the main theme with Joel16’s work

Now, ElevenMPV 2.1.0 has been released and this brings along:

• The ability to access any directory on the PSVita thus making it an unsafe homebrew
  • This means you need to have Unsafe Homebrew enabled in HENkaku Settings and VitaShell will warn you about it being unsafe before letting you install it; it poses no risk to your device’s well-being!
• Lastdir.txt is removed after switching to another device to fix a bug that caused the homebrew to crash
• Some UI fixes including a tidying up of the menu title in device settings and a fix to the cancel button of the settings menu not being used
• Playing speed on down-sampled MP3 files has been fixed, dr_libs was updated to the latest version and decoder functions got a minor cleanup

To grab ElevenMPV 2.1.0, check out its GitHub release page to download the VPK. It’s currently not available on VitaDB (and VHBB by extension) but will soon be.

Conclusion

Other than noteworthy releases for the PS4 and PSVita, there’s also some news in the Nintendo Switch scene as Nintendo has quietly released a new model of the original Nintendo Switch with improved battery life. This brings its battery life up to 4.5-9 hours (5.5 hours playing Zelda BotW which is a somewhat demanding game) from 2.5-6.5 hours.

Models that come with better battery life have a serial number starting with XKW and are most likely Mariko units which contain a die-shrunken SoC. For more information on this, check out Extreme Tech’s detailed article about it!

The featured image was grabbed from this video demonstrating Crash Bandicoot running on a FW 5.05 PS4 on Hyndrid’s channel which also contains some other PS4 emulation videos.