How Handheld Devices and PS4 Emulation are Saving Old Games

Sony is changing how you buy and play its games, but the PS4 catalog has a backup the company can't control. While most attention has gone to jailbroken PS5s, and plenty of people are upset that Sony is moving away from physical games, a group of developers has spent the last few years building a PS4 emulator for PC.

It has now reached the point where you can play Bloodborne at 60 FPS any time you want, which is a big step forward. The key thing to remember is that this PS4 emulator is at its weakest right now, and it only gets better from here. Right now, only a limited number of games run properly, but the PS3 emulator followed the same path.

Around five years ago it was in a similar spot, and today you can use a Steam Deck to play whatever PS3 game you like, including Infamous and Dante's Inferno, along with the other games that spent years stuck on that platform. Things look set to go the same way with the PS4, and progress seems to be happening a lot faster this time around.

One sign of that speed is a new handheld Anbernic just announced, the RG DDS.

It's a dual-screen handheld, and you can think of it as a supercharged Nintendo DS Lite that plays games from every generation up to the PS4. Anbernic is confident enough in the hardware that its trailer shows the PS4 version of Transformers: Devastation running on it.

The company has a catchphrase about being game-breaking, or something close to that, but all it really does is run PS4 games, and by the look of it, it runs them fairly well. That kind of confidence from a hardware maker says a lot about where the PS4 emulator stands.

You shouldn't rush to pre-order it, though. Anbernic devices have never been that strong, and a better option should handle PS4 games more comfortably thanks to a stronger chip: the AYN Thor. If you want every PlayStation generation on a dual-screen setup, that's the one to look at.

It has two OLED screens, excellent battery life, and a chip capable of running a PS4 emulator. You can load it up with just about every console, from the 3DS to the PS1 to the PSP. Silent Hill: Origins, for example, plays really well on a smaller OLED screen.

Videos of Bloodborne running through the PS4 emulator are already out there.

This means PS4 games are playable on a dual-screen handheld roughly the size of a Nintendo 3DS, and the AYN Thor fits into that picture. That matters because of the odd spot Sony is in. It is pulling inward with its first-party single-player games, saying they will no longer come to PC and will stay on PlayStation. That's a fair call, since consoles should have exclusives. On top of that, though, Sony is also removing physical games.

Put those two moves together, and it points toward a future where downloads go away as well. Once the infrastructure is good enough and the data centers that are making hardware so expensive are built, Sony could tell you it knows downloading games to your console is a hassle.

Physical games are already gone, which lifted some of that burden, so the next step would be to host everything in the cloud and have you stream it. You would be told not to worry about Sony updating games, removing content, or you living too far from a data center to get a good experience.

By then, the people with a poor experience would be so few that Sony wouldn't need to think about them, much like it doesn't seem to worry about its hardcore fans and the games they want right now. That future feels close to inevitable, but you don't have to like it, and having a device that can play your games matters.

The strange part is that this safety net showed up sooner than most people expected.

Even leaving the AYN Thor aside, a Steam Deck OLED is basically the ultimate PlayStation console. Unlike a PS5, it can emulate everything up to the PS4, including Bloodborne, and those games run decently through the PS4 emulator.

That safety net is what makes all of this easier to take. No matter what Sony does to get people to move on from the PS4, the console looks set to live on. A running joke is that skipping the PS5 means you're now forced to spend hundreds more than you would have a few years ago just to play GTA 6.

Keeping the PS4 alive is worthwhile, because it was the best generation Sony has had, even if plenty of players will always favor the PS3 for Uncharted and Uncharted 2. First-party output during the PS4 years was remarkable, and the people working on the PS4 emulator are keeping it playable, with a Steam Deck being enough to take advantage of it.

If Sony isn't going to put much effort into keeping those games available going forward, it helps that someone is building the PS4 emulator. Open questions also remain about the PS6. If it launches without a disc drive but can play PS4 games, it's unclear whether your discs could be converted to digital, or whether Sony would introduce another buying program, such as a 10% loyalty discount for anyone who has played those games before.

For now, the future of older games is in flux, and that isn't a comfortable place to be. Still, being able to play them through the PS4 emulator on a dual-screen handheld, to the point where hardware makers are advertising it, makes the situation easier to accept.