PCSX4 Emulator 2016
Emmanuelle Riker
The site looks so real and for someone like me who is new to emulation, I almost downloaded their link. Maybe I'm just dumb but their site is so professional looking, I can see how so many people could fall for them, especially since their link is the first result when you google PS4 emulators.
I'd love to play Bloodborne or Persona 5 on my PC, and that is actually possible, sort of: Bloodborne is available in Sony's PlayStation Now streaming service, which lets you play games from the cloud on a PS4 or PC. But what about a PS4 emulator that runs the games I own on real PC hardware? Are PCs powerful enough to run a PS4 emulator? Is PCSX4 a real emulator, or a fake?
No. As of early 2019, real PlayStation 4 emulation on PC is impossible. If you're familiar with hardware emulation, this may not come as a big surprise. Creating an emulator requires reverse-engineering what a piece of hardware is doing when it runs games, then rewriting that functionality for an entirely different platform, like a Windows PC. This process takes years, and also typically requires far more powerful hardware than the original machine. Dolphin, an emulator for the GameCube and Wii, has been in development for more than a decade, and is still improving. The same goes for PCSX2, a great, popular PS2 emulator.
There is a PlayStation 3 emulator, called RPCS3, that can run more than 1000 PS3 games in a playable state. But that's only about a third of the library. Many others work, but have too many glitches or performance issues to run well.
PCSX2 is a real PS2 emulator. It's great. PCSX4 is a scam that tries to look legitimate with a similar name. PCSX4's website is an impressive-looking fake, with embedded Youtube videos, an FAQ, and even a Github page where the code for this "semi open source" project is supposedly held. But there are some telltale signs it's a fake. Its Github repository has no activity and no people attached to it. The FAQ looks convincing, even going so far as to list errors, but its hardware requirements raise a big red flag. A PS4 emulator would be far more demanding than what PCSX4 lists. According to a reddit thread documenting the scam, PCSX4's previous YouTube channel was shut down for its fake videos.
Here's the real giveaway that PCSX4 is a scam: When you click the download link, it asks you to fill out a survey first. No legitimate emulator project is going to make you fill out a survey to download anything.
You may have run into these kinds of surveys before. They say you may be able to win a new iPhone or some other prize, but after a few minutes of clicking you end up redirected to yet another survey. Someone makes money off your time, and you don't get the thing you were promised. Don't bother. PCSX4 is just a scam, and there's actually a real PS4 emulator you should check out, instead.
Unfortunately, even if development continues, it'll be years before Orbital can run games. It's also possible that other PS4 emulators will appear with different approaches or faster development. But for right now, Orbital's the only game in town.
You can also play all your PS4 games on PC which you downloaded on your PS4 console. Besides that, I give you this emulator without any survey for free. So, just go with the download link and download this PS4 emulator and enjoy your game. Please read this article so that you can easily download and install your PS4 emulator.
Summary:- Finally, I hope that you can easily get this article and able to install the PS4 emulator. Besides that, if you need any help then you can write to me, I will get back to you as soon as possible. Please like and share my Facebook page and subscribe to push notification. Also, bookmark my website for quick access in the future.
In order to have an emulator to run the games on you have to be able to emulate the hardware the software runs on. The emulation of the hardware is the part that requires a lot of raw power, which does not exist in the consumer space at this point.
And before anyone goes 'Oh, but consoles are X86 now, it should be a piece of cake'. The classic Xbox was an x86 Intel Celeron 733mhz CPU running DirectX on a custom Nvidia GPU that laid somewhere between GeForce 3 and GeForce 4 yet we are still a long way away from a serviceable Classic Xbox emulator capable of playing Classic Xbox games. (And Sega Chihiro games, since that arcade platform ran on the same Xbox hardware).
Due to the PS4's x86 architecture and FreeBSD-based operating system, emulators for the device will, by and large, be very unconventional. Despite the x86's instruction set being huge[8], a trait that would typically lead to years of development time by emulators, it opens the ability for pre-existing hypervisors to do the heavy lifting, eliminating the need for a recompiler. There is also, as of this time, little to no documentation on the GPU (a modified Radeon 7970M with disabled stream processors) used in the PS4's APU, and it will require a complete re-implementation by emulator developers.
Because most people don't understand how emulation works, scammers try and take advantage of this by making fake emulators for malicious purposes. The PS4 has seen its fair share of scams, the most notable and persistent of which being PCSX4. The scheme is very elaborate and clever, with a website designed to mimic RPCS3's while using a similar naming scheme as PCSX and PCSX2 (both of which are legitimate). The site uses aggressive search engine optimization (SEO), meaning it's one of the top results for "PS4 emulator" on Google. Two things invalidate PCSX4's legitimacy:
After you press Apply, you can whether use a native Windows feature: press Windows button, type joy.cpl, press Enter. Pick Wireless Controller from the list, and start pressing the buttons. Or go to this website and check whether PS4 controller emulator for PC works properly.
In this article I will discuss how I successfully escaped the PS2 emulator developed for the PlayStation 4. See also Part 2, covering the next part of the exploit chain, and PlayStation's response to the research.
Sony aggressively removed JIT privileged attack surface from the PS5, disabling JIT in both the web browser and the BluRay player. Since the PS2 emulator is really a PS4 title that runs due to backwards compatibility, they were unable to make changes to the software, and so its JIT privilege had to be spared.
Having JIT privilege means that fully compromising the emulator, including the compiler co-process, would grant the ability to run fully arbitrary native code (not just ROP) on the PS4/PS5 without the need for a kernel exploit. This would be especially convenient on the PS5 because the newly introduced hypervisor enforces that code pages (both userland and kernel) are not readable, and I don't have the patience to try to write a blind kernel exploit again as I did when I ported BadIRET to the PS4 without a kernel dump.
It's my interpretation that the existence of games with special privileges, like the PS2 emulator's JIT, fundamentally violates their own security model because it leaves privileged code with no readily available mechanisms to patch potential future vulnerabilities.
Given PS2 code execution from any of the 3 identified exploitable PS2 games, I started reverse engineering the emulator itself. The very first thing I looked at was the memory read/write callbacks; you can see on ps2tek that some addresses control various PS2 hardware functionality, and so accessing them requires special code for the emulator to handle those requests.
Note that other registers like 0x1f402016 (CDVD S Command), and 0x1f402004 (CDVD N Command), are also vulnerable to buffer overflows, so in total there are at least 4 variant vulnerabilities like this, but since the emulator is quasi-unpatchable, and PlayStation's bounty program stopped accepting PS2 emulator escape reports after the first one, there is no reason to find or analyse other bugs.
If we go back to the memory read/write handlers, we'll see that the code handling virtual memory addresses backed by Random-Access-Memory regions are implemented using pointers. For instance, when the PS2 performs a 32-bit write to IOP RAM, the emulator will eventually perform a write at its native iopram pointer:
By overwriting it, we will effectively remap the emulator's internal pointer to IOP RAM (from its normal value of the fixed address 0x9000000000), so that any read/writes we make from the PS2 to the IOP RAM region will be redirected to our new address.
In practice, this primitive is not very reliable because the emulator runs multiple threads, which may start to behave unexpectedly if we redirect this pointer, so I didn't end up using it in the final exploit. Let's continue browsing for other corruption targets.
You could probably also copy games off USB storage by manually porting over a USB and FAT implementation (since mount syscalls are restricted), like I did with my native GameBoy emulator Proof-of-Concept for the PS4 1.76 WebKit and JIT exploit.
Once the ISO file is somewhere accessible on the filesystem, it was just a case of locating the emulator's code responsible for opening the disc file (/app0/images/disc01.iso) by setting a breakpoint on sceKernelOpen, using the exploit to call it (with a traversed path like ./../bla/boot.iso to bypass some internal check), undoing any left over corruption, and finally having the PS2 code call LoadExecPS2 to boot an ELF on the newly mounted virtual disc to start the new game.
Note that the emulator was configured specifically for the game it was bundled with (in this case Okage Shadow King), and whilst some of the configuration may be tweakable at runtime through the exploit, expect compatibility with other games to be spotty in general, although at least Klonoa 2 seems to work fine as is (an otherwise $40 dollar game).
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