# FreeBSD-based programs porting (like Sony games)



## Nicushor (Feb 16, 2016)

Hi, it might sound stupid but what will be the problems if somebody would like to port and Sony Playstation games to FreeBSD? I mean i I know Sony uses BSD, so their games should run natively on FreeBSD or not? I am confused.


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## Carpetsmoker (Feb 16, 2016)

I'm fairly sure Sony uses a heavily modified version of FreeBSD which includes, among other things, their own (or modified) graphics drivers and their own libraries.

Porting a PS4 game to FreeBSD would not be easy.


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## SirDice (Feb 16, 2016)

No idea if it actually works but there's emulators/pcsxr.


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## Nicushor (Feb 16, 2016)

Carpetsmoker said:


> I fairly sure Sony uses a heavily modified version of FreeBSD which includes, among other things, their own (or modified) graphics drivers and their own libraries.
> 
> Porting a PS4 game to FreeBSD would not be easy.



I see, am I the only one who thinks this should be a long-term side objective for FreeBSD community? I mean I suppose there's not that many ways to perform what Sony does, and at least we should have a vague idea of what their drivers and libraries work. (such reverse engineering is legal right?)

SirDice: Thank's, I shall get a look at those files.


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## Carpetsmoker (Feb 16, 2016)

Nicushor said:


> am I the only one who thinks this should be a long-term side objective for FreeBSD community?



Probably, yes.



Nicushor said:


> at least we should have a vague idea of what their drivers and libraries work.



I have a vague idea how cars work as well. Doesn't mean I can build one.



Nicushor said:


> such reverse engineering is legal right?



It's murky.



SirDice said:


> No idea if it actually works but there's emulators/pcsxr.



That's a Playstation 1 emulator; although there's also a PCSX2 project for the Playstation 2. But that's still a long way removed from a working PS4 emulator ;-)


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## kpedersen (Feb 17, 2016)

The PS4 OS is still very different to FreeBSD. For example, it doesn't use OpenGL directly (Our internal PS4 SDK provides an OpenGL wrapper but it is rarely used by developers AFAIK).
Also, the big issue is not so much the porting process, it is getting access to the source code to port. I would love nothing more than to open-source all of our projects but unfortunately that isn't really my decision and I doubt other companies will even be thinking about doing this.

If you are hoping to get binaries running on the current FreeBSD, that would be like trying to run a binary from FreeBSD 1.x on FreeBSD 10.x. It wouldn't work, loads of things have changed including the executable format.


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## Nicushor (Feb 17, 2016)

kpedersen said:


> The PS4 OS is still very different to FreeBSD. For example, it doesn't use OpenGL directly (Our internal PS4 SDK provides an OpenGL wrapper but it is rarely used by developers AFAIK).
> Also, the big issue is not so much the porting process, it is getting access to the source code to port. I would love nothing more than to open-source all of our projects but unfortunately that isn't really my decision and I doubt other companies will even be thinking about doing this.
> 
> If you are hoping to get binaries running on the current FreeBSD, that would be like trying to run a binary from FreeBSD 1.x on FreeBSD 10.x. It wouldn't work, loads of things have changed including the executable format.



I see, I wonder if it will come a day when PS4 games will run naitively on FreeBSD, this would be even cooler than Steam on Linux. And Sony can make such a thing...


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## SirDice (Feb 17, 2016)

Don't hold your breath in the mean time. It's just not going to happen, ever.


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## kpa (Feb 17, 2016)

If you want to run PS4 games, buy a PS4. There is zero interest in the FreeBSD community to provide something that is essentially illegal because of trademarks held by Sony. Before you try to argue that there is some twisted obligation for the FreeBSD community to do so, let me remind you that the BSD licence itself encourages what Sony is doing with PS4 by taking FreeBSD and creating a closed source proprietary system using it.


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## beastDemian (Feb 17, 2016)

SirDice said:


> No idea if it actually works but there's emulators/pcsxr.



I doubt there's a PS4 emulator already . People are having trouble getting a PS3 emulator off the ground (though to be fair the PS3 uses a cell procesor and PS4 uses an x86 procesor, but still). Making an emulator (even for something as 'old' as the PS2) is extremely hard. Getting it to effectively use all of the computer's processing power (read: cores) appears to be more difficult (at least according to PSCX2 developers). My guess is we might see one....in 2030.



Nicushor said:


> I see, I wonder if it will come a day when PS4 games will run naitively on FreeBSD, this would be even cooler than Steam on Linux. And Sony can make such a thing...



I doubt they will...they already made an expensive console...why would they bother porting what they did to FreeBSD? There is no economic benefit on the horizon.


By the way, for running PS3 games on FreeBSD someone could make a port of  RPCS3 ( https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3 )   (apparently they can't run commercial games...yet).


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## Carpetsmoker (Feb 17, 2016)

Nicushor said:


> I see, I wonder if it will come a day when PS4 games will run naitively on FreeBSD, this would be even cooler than Steam on Linux. And Sony can make such a thing...



No, no, no. This is silly. The whole premise is silly. Stop now. The thread is over. Director, please start the cartoon!


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## sidetone (Feb 20, 2016)

That would only happen when PS4 becomes obsolete.

Sega makes games that are made to be ported on various platforms. That one is doable on FreeBSD, with Windows emulation or Linux compatibility.

I also read there is a company interested in making proprietary games for both open-source and commercial desktops. A past company went under, because users expected free games on open-source operating systems. This idea tries to get by problem, by providing the same games for both types of operating systems.


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## zspider (Feb 21, 2016)

I wouldn't expect to see any kind of working and usable emulator for PS4 for atleast another decade - if ever.

PS4 games will never run natively on FreeBSD. The project exists to write a solid and stable operating system. Aside from the fact that it would be a huge waste of time and money. The project does not need to go off on tangents for things most people will never use. Also Sony would rage if anyone did try to do that.

The PCSXR emulator works well even with Intel graphics. I beat Gran Turismo 2 on it years ago. There is not PS2 emulator in ports and testing it on Windows with MGS2 was pathetic. Performance was awful even while using the Nvidia chipset.


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## beastDemian (Feb 22, 2016)

zspider said:


> The PCSXR emulator works well even with Intel graphics. I beat Gran Turismo 2 on it years ago. There is not PS2 emulator in ports and testing it on Windows with MGS2 was pathetic. Performance was awful even while using the Nvidia chipset.



What did you use it with? On my 5 year old AMD Phenom X2 machine, PS2 emulation proved...workable. It was only using 2 cores, and I had to use the Windows version, but I could emulate MGS3 just fine. 

Anyway, MGS2 has a PC version, no need to emulate it .


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## zspider (Feb 22, 2016)

beastDemian said:


> What did you use it with? On my 5 year old AMD Phenom X2 machine, PS2 emulation proved...workable. It was only using 2 cores, and I had to use the Windows version, but I could emulate MGS3 just fine.
> 
> Anyway, MGS2 has a PC version, no need to emulate it .



Quad Core I7, 2GHZ, 6GB RAM, 1GB Nvidia 525M. It ran quite poorly and was not smooth enough to be playable. But that was 2 or 3 years ago, I have not tested it since.

I was also unaware MGS2 has a PC version. I will have to look into that, been wanting to play that game.


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## Nikola Petkanski (Jan 9, 2017)

A few days back I was chillin' and played some random videos off YouTube when this one came around..

It is about PS4 internals and is clear it uses FreeBSD. While I don't have the required knowledge to kickstart this, I think the hints given in the video and the github repositories should be a good start if someone is willing to invest time researching on how to run PS4 games on the current FreeBSD distro.


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## sidetone (Jan 9, 2017)

You probably could legally, so long as it's none of their proprietary code, and without looking at their secret sourcecode to reverse engineering that. Still, it wouldn't seem right to emulate their newest systems. Sony will pull the plug on contributing to FreeBSD, anyway, if that happens. It can be done within the confines of respective licenses, without infringing on anyone's property and legally. It's not something FreeBSD, as a community, will get behind.

Their older systems, Playstation 3 (or 2) and older, why not, because that could sell their old games, when their old console is not selling. It wasn't a problem with Bleem, which is old and for Playstation 1. Otherwise just try a PC version of Playstation 4 games, but Microsoft's demands against wine emulation does stop a lot of that; however, that is the best workaround. When Playstation 4 is replaced by a newer Sony gaming system, then, could it be done without stepping on toes.


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## ANOKNUSA (Jan 9, 2017)

Nikola Petkanski said:


> if someone is willing to invest time researching on how to run PS4 games on the current FreeBSD distro.



Why is there such a fascination with this nonsense? First, *it's never going to happen. Never.* The (obvious---oh so obvious) legal troubles alone make it a non-starter. Forget it. You'd get sued before you ever had a working technical proof-of-concept, because the games are the properties of developers and are contractually licensed to Sony for the platform, while Sony's DRM model is probably an integral part of the system.

Second, if you're talking about actually funding such a project, consider that the cost of actually getting this up and running is probably greater than the cost of just buying everyone involved a damn Playstation.


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## bcomputerguy (Jan 9, 2017)

no matter how you try to slice it, no company will allow you to legally "emulate" their hardware. Emulation == piracy even though if it wasn't for emulation a lot of older software would be lost but that argument won't fly.

If you want to emulate other peoples hardware, this isn't the place to talk about those things.


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## tingo (Jan 11, 2017)

The funny thing about topics such as this is that everyone who thinks it is a good idea, should be possible, etc. also thinks that somebody else should do it!
People - that is a bullshit detector! If somebody wants <thing>, but nobody wants to create <thing> it is just a dream. Keep your dreams, but in the meantime work on things that you (and perhaps others) want and can create today.


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## bcomputerguy (Jan 12, 2017)

tingo said:


> The funny thing about topics such as this is that everyone who thinks it is a good idea, should be possible, etc. also thinks that somebody else should do it!
> People - that is a bullshit detector! If somebody wants <thing>, but nobody wants to create <thing> it is just a dream. Keep your dreams, but in the meantime work on things that you (and perhaps others) want and can create today.



True, if you want something bad enough and it's not in the market; create it, invest money to create it, if you aren't willing to invest the money to create it and you don't have the ability to create it; gather the money or learn. If you are unwilling to do any of the above, then keep it to yourself. Ideas are a dime a dozen, it's all in the implementation nobody cares about your ideas and they aren't special lil snowflakes.


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## sidetone (Oct 24, 2017)

devel/psptoolchain relates to home-brew Playstation Portable games. (I'm not sure if that's supposed to be there, but whatever.)


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## PacketMan (Oct 25, 2017)

kpa said:


> If you want to run PS4 games, buy a PS4. There is zero interest in the FreeBSD community to provide something that is essentially illegal because of trademarks held by Sony. Before you try to argue that there is some twisted obligation for the FreeBSD community to do so, let me remind you that the BSD licence itself encourages what Sony is doing with PS4 by taking FreeBSD and creating a closed source proprietary system using it.



Exactly!  I really didn't want to dive into this discussion, but I couldn't resist.  Sorry.

Here is how I look at it:  What is the problem you are trying to fix?  You want to play PS3/4 video games on a machine that uses FreeBSD technology? Then buy a PS3/4. You want a high performance gaming machine? Then go buy a PS3/4. You want a gaming machine with great performance at a good price? Then go buy a PS3/4.  I really struggle to think that we can build a higher performance machine (with lots of other multimedia capabilities included) for less cost than what Sony sells the PS3/4 units for; maybe but I am not sure it would be worth the headache (i.e other problems).  The point I am trying to make is the 'problem' of making a great multimedia and gaming machine running FreeBSD technology has already been solved - PS3/4!!

..and so I have a PS3 and a PS4 in my house.  In the meantime, I'm using the beauty of FreeBSD and the BSD licensing to solve my own problems, just like Sony and a slew of other companies have already done to solve their own 'problems'.   My 'problems' include:

Rid my household of Microsoft Windows.
Build my own NAS, security camera system, distributed 'cloud' server system, etc etc, pretty much the way I want it.
Be careful of the problems (especially legal ones) you choose; you just might get it. And some of those problems (such as legal ones) with or without FreeBSD will be very difficult to solve once you cross the point of no return.

Edit - don't feel flamed!  Hang out with us, read all the cool and legal things we are doing, dive in and have some fun! There is lots of great other things you can do. 

End of rant.


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## poorandunlucky (Nov 13, 2017)

I like Xbox...

I think PS is g-...  no offense... *coughs*


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## aht0 (Jan 6, 2018)

"Hacking the PS4.."
https://cturt.github.io/ps4.html

Interesting reading.


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## Maelstorm (Jan 8, 2018)

As to making an emulator for Sony Playstation by reverse engineering, here's some interesting court cases you might want to look at:

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2003/09/04/ruling-garage-door-opener-case/
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2003/05/30/dvdcca-v-bunner-california-supreme-court/
https://www.wired.com/2017/06/impression-v-lexmark/

These decisions are based in the United States.

The DVD one I think is the big one.  IANAL, but I think that if you own the actual disk for a PS4 game, and your console breaks so you can't play the game anymore, the way that I read it is that you are free to use a competitor's product to play the game...hence the interoperability with the garage door opener case.  You can even make repairs to it, hence the Lexmark one, if you know how to do so.  But, I could be wrong.  My advice is to consult with a lawyer who practices within your part of the world to be sure.


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