PS5PCEM 0.3.0-alpha.4

PS5PCEM 0.3.0-alpha.4

This release brings four more launcher languages, substantial progress in 3D
rendering and Ghost of Yōtei's startup interface, and fixes for Cat Quest III
and Jurassic Park Classic Games Collection. It collects the significant work
since v0.3.0-alpha.3, including 88 intervening commits before release preparation.

Playable and completable games

The project maintainer confirmed the following playthroughs on September 8, 2026:

Game	Reported status
Terminator 2D: No Fate	Fully playable and completable; completed without reported problems
Asterix & Obelix: Slap Them All!	Fully playable and completable
Cat Quest III	Fully playable and completable
Jurassic Park Classic Games Collection	Fully playable and completable

These are title-specific playthrough reports. Frame rate varies by game, scene
and hardware; a completed playthrough does not imply a locked 30 or 60 FPS.
Detailed milestones and gameplay captures live in
project-status.md.

Launcher: eight interface languages

• Add Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Arabic and Portuguese alongside English,
  Russian, German and French. Navigation, game-library prompts, input settings,
  saves, preferences and status/error messages are translated.
• Expand language selection to two rows, with matching click areas and room for
  the sound, FPS and project-information panels.
• Give Arabic text right-to-left paragraph direction and appropriate alignment,
  preserving centered buttons and the original direction of paths and key names.
• Preserve existing saved language IDs and restore all eight choices after a
  restart. Update Windows executable and installer version metadata to this release.

Ghost of Yōtei: beyond the intro

• Restore continuous intro playback at approximately the stream's native 30 FPS
  in ReleaseFast on the current RTX 3070 Ti host. Sampled movie frames take
  about 30–32 ms, without the former freeze after a few pictures.
• Correct Videodec2 picture fields, 256-byte NV12 row alignment, picture-specific
  acknowledgements and end-of-stream draining. Separate decoder instances and
  derive cadence from the stream so clips neither race to the end nor stall on
  the guest's former 100 ms polling timeout.
• Advance through streamed menu-resource loading and into the animated loading
  indicator, Digital Deluxe Bonus, Gift of the Northern Star, Pre-order
  Bonus, and brightness calibration. The reference captures show readable
  text, confirmation glyphs, and the calibration wolf image, instruction and slider.
• Render parts of the interface and 3D background; the maintainer observed trees
  in the scene and heard menu music. Audio-library support now includes more of
  the interfaces bound by the title, including AudioOut2 speaker/port state and
  queued-grain accounting.
• Unblock the menu resource catalog and asynchronous scene work, preserve compute
  queue ownership and completion labels, and retire validated SDK 1.1 command
  ranges without repeatedly replaying stranded work.

Verification boundary: the complete bonus/brightness sequence was verified
on reference build 796a484. The latest renderer was checked through the intro
into scene loading, but that full sequence has not been repeated on this release
candidate. A complete title menu, its full animated background and gameplay are
still unverified. Scene preparation and UI remain very slow: reference runs took
minutes to prepare resources and seconds per UI frame. See the
build-specific investigation.

Cat Quest III and Jurassic Park rendering

• Fix Cat Quest III's upside-down world and intro composition while retaining
  the UI's orientation. Procedural fullscreen passes preserve their UV direction.
• Preserve fragment coverage, alpha-to-coverage state and stencil-only passes.
  This removes the observed menu-text corruption and keeps language-list text
  visible and clipped inside its panel instead of covering it with a white fill.
• Implement the original AGC interpolant-mapping interface used by Cat Quest III.
  Adventure-selection artwork and labels, mountains and other scenery now use
  the correct vertex-to-fragment exports.
• Honor registered RGBA/BGRA scanout formats. The captured island now has blue
  sea and sky and the expected character/scenery colors instead of swapped
  red and blue channels.
• Restore Jurassic Park startup rendering, including its title logo, confirmation
  prompt, collection cover art and animated preview. Respect explicit color
  disable and DX clipping while retaining reset-depth extent recovery for
  Ghost of Yōtei's active HTILE-backed surfaces.

3D shaders, materials and GPU correctness

• Recover pointer-backed and indirect material resources through scalar/vector
  register moves, VCC offsets, restored execution masks, branches and bounded
  loops. Support large global texture tables and mixed sampled-image dimensions
  at runtime, with typed bounds and validation of malformed descriptors.
• Execute bounded absolute/FLAT memory reads used by scene shaders and report
  the first unmapped active address. Resource recovery now follows instructions
  actually visited, avoiding invented bindings from inactive shader branches.
• Correct wave32/wave64 masks, both words of vector conditions, SAVEEXEC operand
  order and SCC, unsigned carry, lane identity and cross-subgroup synchronization.
  Preserve DPP row/permutation behavior and whole-quad execution.
• Add or correct explicit-LOD image gathers and depth comparisons, array
  gradients, RDNA2 sampling operands, fragment storage-image writes, BC4 and
  RG16 SNORM sampling, visible array-layer uploads and mixed integer exports.
• Preserve flat attribute channels and scalar spills. Support D16 loads into
  previously undefined vector registers, high-halfword stores, scene mask
  comparisons and bounded GDS word reads/writes.
• Apply uniform HTILE clears to resident depth images, preserve stencil during
  depth-only clears, support matching D32 depth bias, and improve depth/stencil
  barriers and compute-buffer synchronization.
• Retain descriptors, prepared render targets and image pins until queued draws
  finish using them, preventing cache eviction or command flushes from invalidating
  live GPU work.

Performance and runtime stability

• Cache translated graphics SPIR-V with explicit memory/entry limits and cheaper
  field serialization. Reuse compatible smaller prefixes of uploaded buffers
  while retaining exact descriptor bounds.
• Cat Quest III opening-island samples improve from roughly 148 ms (~6.8 FPS)
  to a 124 ms median (~8 FPS) on the test host. Shader-translation work drops
  from about 40 to 7 ms and buffer uploads from about 124–127 to 65–75 MiB per
  sampled frame. The later capture has a local co-op HUD, so this is an observed
  comparison of the same area, not a controlled benchmark of identical frames.
• Reuse prepared graphics/compute resources and driver compute-pipeline caches;
  index resident sampled images by guest address and shader control flow for
  resource recovery. Share immutable FLAT snapshot headers and retain more small
  storage images within the cache budget.
• Prefer host-cached readback memory, cache reads of resident compute buffers,
  accelerate Windows x64 memory fills, and reuse swizzle offsets for volume/MSAA
  copies. Reduce scene index checks and unnecessary depth readbacks.
• Fix Windows placeholder handling when a small guest mapping occupies the tail
  of a coalesced reservation, preventing the observed Cat Quest III startup
  HostCommitFailed. Bound permission checks to overlapping mappings and prevent
  thread diagnostics from suspending their own calling thread.

Validation and remaining limits

• Build the launcher and runner in ReleaseFast. Exercise all eight launcher
  languages across settings, library, controls and saves, including restart
  persistence and visual checks of the four new translations.
• Focused checks during development cover guest-memory mapping, interpolant
  mapping, shader caching and Vulkan scanout/orientation, fragment coverage,
  stencil/UI and HTILE behavior. Shader changes include targeted SDK GPU probes;
  this does not establish correctness for every game or shader.
• Jurassic Park's collection frontend still has a known AvPlayer handle-pool
  limit when repeatedly cycling preview videos; later previews can become static.
  The maintainer's playable/completable report concerns the games themselves.
• Ghost of Yōtei's full menu and gameplay remain work in progress. Other titles
  can still have missing graphics, stalls or crashes; consult the status document
  for each title's observed milestone.

Downloads and requirements

• Windows x64 portable ZIP, per-user installer, and SHA256SUMS.txt are
  attached to this release. Keep ps5pcem.exe and game-run.exe together.
• Windows 10 2004 or newer, x86-64, with a Vulkan 1.2-capable graphics driver.
• Games, firmware, keys and console system software are not included.
• These prototype binaries are not Authenticode-signed, so Windows may show an
  Unknown Publisher or Microsoft Defender SmartScreen warning.

Full commit comparison

PS5PCEM 0.3.0-alpha.3

PS5PCEM 0.3.0-alpha.3

This prototype update adds video decoding for titles that use
libSceVideodec2, which is what lets Ghost of Yōtei reach and play its intro.

Added

• Decode the H.264 access units a title hands to libSceVideodec2. The host
  decoder receives the stream, the picture is converted from NV12 with BT.709
  coefficients, and decoding is paced to about one picture per display interval
  so a title feeding access units as fast as they are accepted no longer drains
  a whole movie in a few frames.
• Ghost of Yōtei decodes and presents its intro video with sound. Its
  in-engine frame behind the video is still black, so this is a video-playback
  milestone rather than a menu or gameplay claim.
• Recover the completion generation for an SDK 11 compute queue from the
  caller when the queue object is spilled rather than left in a register, which
  releases a render thread that would otherwise spin.

Fixed

• Report a decoded picture where a title reads it. The record was laid out from
  the wrong end, so a title checked a size field for readiness and never saw the
  frames it had been given.
• Report a frame-slot size a title can divide its arena by. A slot as large as
  the whole arena left room for none and ended decoder setup before a single
  frame was decoded.
• Stop presenting an unconverted frame as a black one: a frame whose packed
  format could not be converted was handed back as freshly zeroed bytes, which
  was indistinguishable from a frame the title rendered black.
• Stop the launcher clipping its own name. The brand cells were too small in
  both directions, so the title lost the bottom of every glyph and the subtitle
  ended mid-word.
• Never hand out an asynchronous read identifier that is still in use. A title
  that streams keeps batches open across many submissions, and the table wrapped
  onto live entries during ordinary loading.
• Stop the quiet-thread diagnostic faulting on a wrong guess. It followed two
  addresses out of a suspended thread without checking either, which ended the
  emulator a couple of frames into video playback.
• Run command arenas a title strands behind a CPU-polled fence, rescuing each
  once per submission rather than replaying it in a loop.

Requirements and limitations

• Windows 10 2004 or newer, x86-64, with a Vulkan 1.2-capable graphics driver.
• Compatibility remains experimental; black screens, missing graphics, stalls
  and crashes are still possible in unsupported titles.
• Games, firmware, keys and console system software are not included.
• These prototype binaries are not Authenticode-signed, so Windows may show an
  Unknown Publisher or Microsoft Defender SmartScreen warning.

PS5PCEM 0.3.0-alpha.2

PS5PCEM 0.3.0-alpha.2

This prototype update fixes missing game cover art in the Windows launcher.

Fixed

• Decode each title's sce_sys/icon0.png directly through the Windows GDI+
  image codec.
• Stop depending on PNG file associations and the Windows shell thumbnail
  cache, which could return a generic white document icon instead of artwork.
• Preserve the eight-title recent-game library and its existing local paths.

Requirements and limitations

• Windows 10 2004 or newer, x86-64, with a Vulkan 1.2-capable graphics driver.
• Compatibility remains experimental; black screens, missing graphics, stalls
  and crashes are still possible in unsupported titles.
• Games, firmware, keys and console system software are not included.
• These prototype binaries are not Authenticode-signed, so Windows may show an
  Unknown Publisher or Microsoft Defender SmartScreen warning.

PS5PCEM 0.3.0-alpha.1

PS5PCEM 0.3.0-alpha.1

This is the first public Windows prototype build of PS5PCEM. It is intended for
compatibility testing and development feedback, not as a finished general-purpose
emulator.

Included

• Native Windows launcher with an eight-title recent-game library and local cover art.
• Portable ZIP and per-user installer; neither package requires administrator access.
• Writable per-title savedata browser shared by launcher and direct CLI runs.
• Vulkan 1.2 VideoOut path, experimental RDNA2-to-SPIR-V translation and native x86-64 guest execution.
• Direct DualSense/DualShock HID input, XInput fallback and keyboard/hybrid profiles.
• Adaptive host audio buffering and title-specific scheduling improvements.

Requirements

• Windows 10 2004 or newer, x86-64.
• A current Vulkan 1.2-capable graphics driver.
• Legally obtained decrypted game content and any required system files. They are not distributed with PS5PCEM.

Important limitations

• Compatibility is incomplete; black screens, missing graphics, stalls and crashes remain possible.
• The release contains no games, firmware, keys or copyrighted console system software.
• The installer keeps generated saves and configuration when uninstalling so user data is not silently removed.

Use SHA256SUMS.txt to verify either download before running it.