Hacked PlayStation 4 owners rejoice as Christmas has come a bit late with the release of a RetroArch port to this homebrew-depraved console! Other than that, the PlayStation Vita also received some love with the release of  Electry’s  VitaGrafix 5.0.

PlayStation 4: RetroArch 1.8.1 port gets released with 25 cores

About a year ago, some progress was being made on getting RetroArch, a pretty popular emulator & game engine front-end, ported to the PlayStation 4. This progress consisted of BigBoss getting RetroArch and some cores running on the console which was greatly aided by the fact that OpenGL ES supported was added to liborbis. However, developments about this mostly quieted down after January/February even though work kept going on.

After quite a long wait, RetroArch for the Playstation 4 is now here and many cores seem to work pretty well (Image from GBATemp Release Thread)

Now, the work and effort of Flatz, Frangar and BigBoss has finally paid off since OsirisX has just released a native PlayStation 4 port of RetroArch 1.8.1 for hacked consoles running FW 5.05. Currently, the port contains 25 cores which include emulators for:

• Nintendo consoles including the NES, SNES, Nintendo 64 (currently in experimental state), GameBoy, GameBoy Colour GameBoy Advance (GBA), VirtualBoy and the Nintendo DS
  • A GBATemp user states that Nintendo 64 emulation is pretty slow
• Sega consoles such as the Genesis/Mega Drive, Sega CD & 32X
• The PlayStation 1, WondderSwan, Neo-Geo Pocket, Atari Lynx, arcade machines with MAME, MS-DOS via DOSbox and the ever-present 2048 core

When it comes to importing games on RetroArch, you can load them from both the HDD and a USB device; BIOS files are to be placed in the subfolders found in “/data/retroarch/system”. OsirisX notes that more cores will come in the future and eventually, the PlayStation 4 port will be merged into RetroArch’s main branch which would allow it to be updated in line with official RetroArch releases; this might not take long as Frangar has expressed interest in helping out.

To grab the RetroArch 1.8.1 PKG to install on your PS4, follow the MEGA link on its GBATemp Release Thread. If you wish to see it in action, GBATemp user ‘tecniqueza’ has published a YouTube video demonstrating how well cores work.

PlayStation Vita News: Electry releases VitaGrafix 5.0.0

While the PSVita has a 960×544 screen and is capable of pushing past 30FPS in many games, some developers decided to lower game resolutions and introduce FPS caps in order to preserve battery life or get a better frame rate in the former case. However, circumventing these limits isn’t impossible to do and as a result, many have had a go at doing so with Electry providing VitaGrafix, an all-in-one plugin supporting many popular titles letting you get past the aforementioned limits.

Some titles like Persona 4 Golden run at a lower resolution than 960×544 like 840×476 but can easily have their resolution upped with little to no performance penalty!

Now, version 5.0.0 of the plugin has been released which comes with:

• A rewritten parser/interpreter which changes some of the ‘patchlist.txt’ file’s syntax while retaining compatibility with patches compatible with version 4.x of the plugin
• Support has been added for per-self headers in config.txt letting you use separate options in PSVita titles that come with 2 or more games (like GoW Collection which includes GoW 1 and 2)
• An internal log buffer has been added thus reducing game startup times together with an option in ‘config.txt’ to disable logging
• Support has been added for a 20FPS option, per-game patch lists and in-line comments on the same line as code (used when defining patches)
• Electry notes that version 5.0.1 will be coming soon as titles with multiple resolution patches like Ninja Gaiden 2 may crash if not all resolutions are specified

It’s also important to state that VitaGrafix Configurator (a GUI tool for specifying VitaGrafix’s settings on the PSVita itself) is currently not compatible with VitaGrafix 5.0 but its creator Kirezar promises to update it in the future.

To grab VitaGrafix 5.0.0, follow this link and check out its GitHub Wiki for installation/configuration instructions; you should also look at its official patch list to see which games are supported. You may also be intersted in PSVShell by the same author which is an excellent over-clocking plugin.

Conclusion

Other than these releases, the 3DS also received some stuff including TwiLight Menu++ 11.2.0 and a full English translation for Rocket Slime 3.