RPCS3 Team Gearing Up For New Announcement; Fans Speculate PS Vita Support

Looks like there’s more to come to RPCS3 users before this year ends. The team behind the experimental open-source PlayStation 3 emulator and debugger have apparently hinted at a new announcement on Dec. 1.

This Sunday, the RPCS3 team updated the emulator’s official website to show a clock that’s counting down to the day they will be making a new announcement. Nothing else is known apart from the Dec. 1 date of the announcement, so this has led fans to speculate on what’s about to come.

So far, many are assuming that the RPCS3 team could be announcing support for the PS Vita, Sony’s handheld game console that was introduced in 2011. One Reddit user (Cvoro89) shared on a thread about the upcoming RPCS3 announcement: “Pretty sure in one of their monthly progress reports there were mentions of some PS Vita groundwork being implemented, nothing big but still.” Meanwhile, user shoopdahoop22 pointed out: “Well, there IS vita emulation on RPCS3, but as of right now its [sic] capable of literally nothing but outputting ‘Hello World.’ It hasn’t been touched for god knows how long.”

Of course, others are also speculating that this could probably be about “The Last Of Us.” Mxdwn.com reports that there’s already an in-joke within the community about the lack of support for “The Last of Us.” There’s even a Discord channel that pokes fun at the situation by bearing a single message which says, “Not Yet.”

Others are claiming that the RPCS3 team could be gearing up for the announcement of support for “Metal Gear Solid 4,” which was initially released in 2008. Reddit user dunnibb opined that the announcement would most likely be about “MGS4” since there are already rumblings about the game working on Discord. Other users have since expressed their excitement for this possibility.

In October, the RPCS3 team added support for ultra-high resolutions. The emulator’s creators at the time said that RPCS3 now supports “resolutions far exceeding what the PS3 could handle,” which is up to 10K. “Although we doubt many users will have the setup necessary to benefit from 10K today, emulation is all about preserving for tomorrow,” the creators wrote on their blog.

“The difference is quite incredible in titles that have high quality assets. There is a lot of detail that just wasn’t visible at 720p. This feature is available for every PlayStation 3 game running on RPCS3. The only exception being that it does not yet work with Strict Rendering Mode. Games that require this setting will have to wait a bit longer before they can benefit from high resolution rendering.”

RPCS3, which started in 2011, is written in C++ and developed with the open-source LLVM Compiler Infrastructure project for Windows and Linux. It is currently capable of running over 1,300 commercial titles on top of Vulkan, OpenGL and DirectX 12 renderers. Although RPCS3 is free and open-source software, its creators are accepting donations through Patreon.

On the official RPCS3 website, the team indicated that they receive $3,300 per-month in funding with 700+ Patrons. “With your continued support, our core developers can continue working full time, perfecting our emulator. As a reminder, the funding received from our patrons is used to purchase additional hardware for development / testing and allows this website to stay afloat in this sea of cats and memes we call the internet.”