Releasing version 0.01

[VocalFan]

When do you think we should release the first ever version, and what version should it be called? @ultimaweapon Should it be when we can load firmware? Or when we can load a game without any issues?

[ultimaweapon]

We should have at least one game that can boot to the title menu successfully.

[ArbestRi02]

Any more updates? It's been 1 year since any.

[SuchAFuriousDeath]

I would say we're pretty close to drawing things to the screen

[ultimaweapon]

TLDR is we don't really know how long we need to release the first version. Here is a long version what was happened since we started this project:

When we forked from Kyty we tried to slowly migrate its code to Rust but we found a lot of things that we don't like like homegrown framework, using Lua as a configurations so we decided to rewrite the project from scratch. We use this opportunity to pursuit a different way of emulation since we don't believe the way Kyty does are the right way because the PS4 has a lot of libraries. It is going to be a tremendous task to reimplement the required functions in those libraries correctly.

We believed the Kyty way is easy to make the project run a small set of games but it is very hard to run all games flawlessly because it is required all reimplemented functions to work in the same way as PS4. So we decided to reimplement the PS4 kernel instead and reuse all of those PS4 libraries. The benefit of this way is we only need to do reverse engineering on the PS4 kernel instead of a hundred of PS4 libraries, which will be much easier to make the implementation closely match wit the PS4. The downside is it will take a long time to boot the first game but once the first game boot most games are likely to boot without any specific hacks.

Our first reimplementation of the PS4 kernel is a user-mode application, which will have a lot of limitations but we think it is enough to run the PS4 game. But as we make a progress we continue to found out this is going to be a problem because:

1. The PS4 game map at a fixed address, which we cannot achieve with a user-mode kernel without hacks.
2. We need to patch the game and PS4 libraries to replace some instructions like syscall and fs access, which is one kind of a hack and have some problem to make it right.
3. The PS4 libraries required some background services and we cannot run those services because of a limitation of a user-mode kernel.

So we decided to make a real kernel that run on a kernel-mode, which we recently successfully boot it. With the kernel-mode kernel we don' need any hacks and all of above issues will be automatically fixed. The downside is people won't be able to boot a game directly from the emulator because they need to boot the PS4 OS and launch the game like they did on the PS4.