Emulation on Android has been somewhat of a fascinating ride, and as the tech keeps on improving, so does the scope of these projects. We’ve already seen GTA 5 (PC) and certain PS3 games run surprisingly well on mobile hardware, and it was about time that Sony’s eighth-generation console made its way as well.
Not many folks might be aware, but a PlayStation 4 emulator for Android exists, and it’s made rapid progress in the past few months alone, making it worth a try.
Installing and setting up Bachata-S4
Arguably easier than ARMSX3
Despite its odd name, Bachata-S4 is a very real and very capable PlayStation 4 emulator for Android. It’s powered by shadPS4, the PlayStation 4 emulator for PC.
Of course, shadPS4 is an x86-64 app, and Android predominantly runs on ARM hardware, which creates a bit of a conundrum.
This is why Bachata-S4 is more than just a simple wrapper for shadPS4; it combines FEX (to translate x86-64 to ARM) along with native Android system/Turnip drivers to make for a surprisingly seamless PlayStation 4 emulator.
It works and can be accessed from the official GitHub page for the project. It’s also quite active and frequently receives updates. On the flip side, this also makes it highly experimental software. Expect instability and game compatibility to be a hit or miss at this stage.
Testing out PlayStation 4 games on a modestly powerful Android tablet
Promising results, especially for something this early
Going back to the hardware used to test things out, I used a Lenovo Legion Tablet armed with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 and 12GB RAM. By modern standards, it’s not as powerful (as compared to something like a Snapdragon 6 Elite, for example), but it does qualify as a supported Snapdragon flagship SoC.
The 12GB of system RAM also helps, and I’d be wary of running this emulator on devices with 8GB or less RAM to spare.
As for the installation, it was as simple as picking the emulator’s APK file from the GitHub page and installing as you would from a third-party source. Once deployed, Bachata-S4 will ask for notifications permission and access to a folder containing your (legally acquired) PS4 game ROM dumps.
In my experience, pkg files refuse to cooperate with Bachata-S4. I had to use a utility to convert the pkg file into an uncompressed folder (ps4-pkg-tools from the AUR), and then point the emulator to the directory containing these files. Otherwise, it just refused to add the game to my library, rendering the whole thing unusable.
As for the titles to test, they were the following:
- God of War 3 Remastered
- The Last of Us Remastered
- Bloodborne
All games were tested on the same device, at a target resolution of 720p, with GPU Turbo clocks enabled. Results were, inevitably, mixed.
God of War 3 fared the best here, and compared to its PlayStation 3 counterpart, the remastered version performs a lot better, subjectively speaking. It’s a doubled frame rate, but twice 5FPS is still a measly 10FPS.
That said, the game never crashed on my playthrough, and there were basically zero visual artifacts.
Next up: The Last of Us Remastered, which absolutely refused to launch in-game. The game did manage to enter the main menu and a part of the introductory segment, but it always seemed to crash right before you’re handed control. At least it boots — ARMSX3 can’t do that yet.
And finally, we come to Bloodborne, which was a bit of a pleasant surprise. Despite a ton of graphical glitches in the character creation menu, the game booted fine into the starting hub but still crashed after a minute of gameplay.
I assume this must be due to a RAM deficit, since it froze the tablet entirely. The tablet also heated up significantly, and I’d recommend using a phone cooler for extended sessions and considering the community-driven built-in patches to boost frame rates.
PS4 emulation on Android might still be in its initial phases, but the fact that these games work at all is no small miracle in and of itself. Given enough time and updates, I’m sure we’ll get to a state where we can play Bloodborne on Android very soon — without any hacks.
There’s a reason why PS4 emulation is faster than PlayStation 3
You might have noticed by now that these games seem to generally run better than their PlayStation 3 counterparts, and that is no coincidence. The PlayStation 3 is just a much more exotic, difficult console to emulate.
Most of this can be attributed to its custom “Cell” processor, which doesn’t resemble standard x86_64 PC hardware in the slightest. Combine that with a FreeBSD-based OS that needs to be reversed, and you get a messy situation.
With so much overhead, it makes sense that PlayStation 3 games turn out to be more difficult to run. In contrast, the PlayStation 4 uses a standard x86_64 CPU with a CGN AMD GPU die, which makes it much easier to emulate and also delivers more in terms of performance.