ShadPS4, the new PS4 emulator on the street

A lot of progress has been made in the past few years when it comes to PS4 emulation. We’ve seen in particular extremely good progress with fpPS4 (for which development seems to have slowed down a little bit unfortunately), but the new kid on the block is ShadPS4, an emulator which already runs some games, and took the crown of “first PS4 emulator to reach the character screen in Bloodborne”. Yup, it doesn’t run the game yet, but it’s getting there, it seems!

What is ShadPS4

ShadPS4 is a work-in-progress PS4 Emulator that runs on Windows and Linux. Although the list of playable games is very, very limited (with literally only one game, Habroxia 2, being reported as playable to the end) the emulator is extremely promising. ShadPS4 developers have showcased games such as Bloodborne reaching the character creation screen.

Yeah, it’s not letting you play yet, but this is particularly impressive, considering no other PS4 emulator has reached this point yet.

There is also a growing list of games that at least load and let you interact with them. Currently sitting at 34 reported games, which, as is typically the case, are mostly 2D based for now. FpPS4 still has the lead here with 112 reported playable games at the time of writing.

The latest version of ShadPS4, version 0.1.0, was released 3 weeks ago, and introduced a shader recompiler. This allowed several games to reach the “ingame” status, which typically means they can reach the main menu.

Download and install ShadPS4 – PS4 Emulator for Windows and Linux

You can Download ShadPS4 from the project’s website here, or from their github releases.  Sources are also available on their github.

Check their quickstart guide to run the emulator.

You will need some libraries which can be extracted from a (Jailbroken) PS4. There are certainly files being shared somewhere if you won’t extract them yourself, but that would certainly be a grey legal area, considering those libraries are technically sony’s intellectual property. From the emulator’s readme:

Shadps4 can load some modules in lle mode, some are neccesary some have HLE replacements. The folllowing fw modules are supported and must be placed under user/sys_modules folder.Tested fw modules are from fw 11.00

• libSceNgs2.sprx
• libSceLibcInternal.sprx
• libSceDiscMap.sprx
• libSceRtc.sprx
• libSceJpegEnc.sprx
• libSceJson2.sprx

Above modules should be extracted from your ps4 . We don’t provide any info or support of how to do it.

For more details and a list of other PS4 emulators, check our PS4 Emulators page