Another Major PS4 Exclusive Runs on PC; Play The Last Guardian Without an Emulator!

An enthusiast of video games is developing an unofficial version of The Last Guardian that runs directly on personal computers without an emulator. Players wishing to experience this version

A video game enthusiast is developing an unofficial version of The Last Guardian that runs directly on PC without an emulator.

Players do not need a full console emulation to experience this version, unlike the usual methods. Although this project is still in the early stages of development, its creator has so far managed to run the game from the main menu to the gameplay section and make its sound system fully compatible. According to the developer, the game will run at 1080p resolution and at an unlimited frame rate. This project on a system equipped with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card and AMD Ryzen 5 9600X processor (when experiencing the main parts of the game) has achieved a rate of 60 to 75 frames per second. The performance in the menus is even better and the frame rate in these sections reaches 120 frames per second.

One of the most important technical challenges of this project has been the implementation of the sound system of the game. The developer had to independently rebuild Sony's Ngs2 sound engine, which is responsible for processing and combining sounds. Soundtracks, character dialogue, Trico's voices, and character footsteps all play correctly now. In the graphics section, this project uses shadPS4 simulator codes; A tool that translates PlayStation 4 graphics commands to run through the Vulkan API. In addition, the manufacturer has implemented its own versions of the console's system libraries so that the game can have the features it needs on the computer.

This developer also explained that during the construction of this project, he used the Claude Opus artificial intelligence model as a programming assistant. The model wrote part of the code under his supervision, but the game was tested on real hardware and technical decisions were still left to the developer.

The creator of this project also provided more detailed explanations about his work process in the Reddit forum. He emphasized that this version is not a stable reconstruction of the game code in the way used in some projects of old consoles. Because the PlayStation 4 uses an x86-64 processor, the original game code can be run directly on the computer. The major part of the developer's work has been building the infrastructure that makes it possible to run the game in the Windows environment. These infrastructures include loading the game's executable file, implementing PlayStation 4 system libraries, and supporting features such as thread management, files, storage, controller, and sound.

Of course, the creator of this project did not start his work from scratch. He used several existing projects as a starting point, including the unofficial PC version of God of War III. Also, the bloodborne project (made by deadinside28) and its Windows version developed by Supermedo also played a role in the formation of this infrastructure. Despite these improvements, implementing sound has been the most difficult part of the job. At first, only the game music was played and it was heard only from the left channel of the headphones.

Eventually, the developer realized that the game's sound effects used the HE-VAG format (a newer variant of the VAG format). Using old decoding methods had caused distortions in the sounds and it took him a long time to identify this problem. In terms of performance, there is still a lot of room for optimization, despite achieving a rate of 60-75 fps. According to the manufacturer, the RTX 4070 graphics card is not under much pressure when playing the game, and the main limitation is more related to the processor.

This project is still under development and testing and some parts need to be modified. The manufacturer has announced that it will be released when users can experience the game without facing many problems. Of course, the original game files will not be provided with the project and users must prepare them themselves.