PSVita & PS4 Release: Music Premium released for the PSVita allowing for background music playback in games & RetroArch for PS4 gets updated with 12 new cores including DeSmuME, improved N64 cores & FB Alpha
Plugin-mania seems to have continued on the PlayStation Vita and this time, we got a highly requested plugin letting you play music in background! Other than that, the PlayStation 4 has also seem some love again with its RetroArch port being updated with 12 new cores which we’ll be looking at in this article.
PSVita Release: Music Premium, by cuevavirus of Team CBPS, is out letting you play music in background
As evidenced by the introduction, Music Premium is a kernel plugin for the PlayStation Vita which lets you play music in background from the official Music application everywhere.
The PlayStation Vita’s music app is now infinitely more useful as you can use it for background music playback while gaming!
This is an extension to functionality that’s offered natively by the PSVita’s firmware which allows you to play music in background in LiveArea and some applications but not games.
Music Premium, by Team CBPS member cuevavirus/Marburg, is based/inspired upon MusicNonStop, a recently-released plugin by GrapheneCt with the same functionality, with the addition of some of its own features which include:
- Full compatibility with all games/applications including TheFlow’s Adrenaline
- Game sounds aren’t disabled when music is paused
- It lets you enable global music playback with only a single line of config (not sure about what’s meant here)
As this plugin has you using the Music app, you’ll have to either import your own music via QCMA or import them on-device through cnsldv’s Media importer by placing your MP3 tracks in ux0:/music.
To grab Music Premium and start playing your own tunes while gaming, follow this link and install the plugin under the *KERNEL section of your taiHEN config file.
PS4 News: RetroArch port receives update with 12 new cores & fix for launching games from playlists
Moving over to the PSVita’s big brother and Sony’s current home console, the PlayStation 4 has just received a pretty significant update to its RetroArch port released about a week ago. RetroArch is a popular front-end for numerous emulators/game-engines available on a wide variety of platforms including the PlayStation Vita and Nintendo Switch.
RetroArch for the PS4 now comes with more cores and lets emulate the DS and Sega Saturn together with some other systems!
This update, which is labelled as ‘r2’, comes with the following additions:
- 12 new cores which include:
- Two Mupen64 cores which provide slightly better Nintendo 64 emulation
- DeSmuME for Nintendo DS emulation
- 5 FB Alpha cores (Arcade)
- 2 Mednafen cores, one for the PC-FX and another for the SuperGrafix
- Yabause for Sega Saturn emulation together with fMSX
- Launching games from playlists now functions as expected
To grab RetroArch for the PS4 r2, you can head over to its GBATemp Release Thread which contains both download links and more information.
Conclusion
Other than the PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 4, the Nintendo Switch and Emulation scenes have both seen some pretty significant stuff as well such as the release of Atmosphere 0.10.2 for the former (which disables hid-mitm by default) and the public release of Cemu 1.16.1 in the latter which comes with numerous optimisations to the recently-introduced Vulkan rendering backend together with a few other improvements (changelog / download link)!
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Bolding “but not games” made skimming through this confusing and awkward.
What games can’t you play music with that you need this plugin with? I just launched a few and they worked no problem. I suppose Adrenaline is a valid use-case, but to say you can’t play music and games at the same time is a bit misleading without examples.
Wait! What?! You can play games and play your own music in the background?! You’re joking right?
Been trying to do that since the PS Vita launch date but every time I do it the music player gets paused by force.
After reading this article, I did a sanity check and launched both Killzone Mercenary and Uncharted: Golden Abyss and both let me play music while playing the games without the use of a plugin.