The Raspberry Pi 5 is a popular single-board computer for building retro game emulators, but it has historically struggled to emulate anything higher than the PlayStation Portable or Dreamcast. The PlayStation 2 emulation is spotty at best, with some games running well and more intense ones like God of War and Ratchet and Clank not.
The PS3 is one of the most popular consoles for development, let alone emulation. Largely thanks to the custom “Cell” processor, which has one high-performance PPE core and 8 efficient SPE cores. A design that was somewhat ahead of its time, given that performance and efficiency cores have only become widespread in recent years.
So you’re forgiven for fits of sarcastic laughter when someone claims that PlayStation 3 emulation works on the device, probably assuming that loading into the game’s menu or displaying 2fps isn’t a viable emulation.
However, the team behind RPCS3 has proven just that. An Arm64 RPCS3 build running under Arch Linux on a
Raspberry Pi 5. Of course, there are some caveats. Games are displayed at PSP-equivalent resolution and frame rates are limited to 30, not to mention more intense games that won’t launch at all. However, God of War 2, Demon’s Souls, Outrun Arcade, Naruto and Oblivion seem to work, although you’d be hard-pressed to tell RPCS3 from PSP at this resolution.
At $149.99 for the Raspberry Pi 5 Starter Kit on Amazon, there are probably cheaper and better ways to emulate the PS3, but the Arm64 build opens the door to emulation on a number of other Arm devices, including Apple Silicon, where luckily the performance much better.
