Installation Woes
Anyone who’s tinkered with emulators on Android before knows things rarely work out of the box. You’ll frequently need to adjust settings and drivers to get the best performance, and often things still won’t work, despite your best efforts. This is especially true at the frontier of emulation, which includes the Nintendo Switch and, now, the PlayStation 3.
In a way, aPS3e makes things easier because it has no settings. The app is so new, and so barebones that there’s no settings menu at all. If a game works, it works; if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. That’s almost a welcome change if you’re used to setting up Winlator containers.
However, there was one small trick required to get most games to work. While it can load both ISO and PKG files, the associated .rap files need to be manually moved to the aps3e/config/dev_hdd0/home/000000001/exdata directory. Only one game made it to the install screen without it, and I can’t tell you why for the life of me.
The installation process is hit or miss, to say the least.
If a game manages to load, it will take a few minutes to install the first time you run it. Most games I tested didn’t make it past this phase. Sometimes they would work on a second or third try, but more often than not, the journey ended there.
A Good First Effort
Over the past few days, we’ve tried over a dozen games, and only a handful have managed to launch. Some immediately crashed the app when added to the library, some installed but crashed when we tried to play them, and a few were playable to various degrees.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the games we tested and how they performed:
- 3D Dot Game Heroes: Installed, good performance
- Birds of Steel: Failed to install
- Catherine: Failed to install
- Dark Souls: Installed, but crashed at launch
- Dark Souls 2: Installed, but crashed at launch
- Dead or Alive 5: Launched into game, choppy performance
- Disgaea D2: Failed to install
- Dragon’s Crown: Launched into game, good performance
- Katamari Forever: Failed to install
- LittleBigPlanet: Failed to install
- LittleBigPlanet 2: Installed, but crashed at launch
- Modnation Racers: Installed, but crashed at launch
- Ratchet & Clank – A Crack in Time: Failed to install
- Rayman Origins: Launched into game, good performance
- Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection: Installed, but crashed at launch
- UFC 2009 Undisputed: Failed to install
- Wipeout HD Fury: Failed to install
As you can see, only four of the 17 games we tried were playable, although Dead or Alive 5 barely chugged along. Lightweight games like 3D Dot Game Heroes and 2D games like Rayman Origins appear to be your best bet, although other 2D games didn’t manage to install at all. Even then, the lack of controller support means you’ll be fighting with touch controls.
Final Thoughts
Since most of the games were tested on Snapdragon 8 Elite devices, it’s worth pointing out that your results may vary. Drivers are optimized over the life of a chipset, so chips that are three or four years old can work better than cutting-edge silicon. That said, for demanding activities like PS3 emulation, the extra power goes a long way.
Overall, the most impressive thing here is that these games launch at all. Previous efforts required Windows or Linux containers, which puts a further strain on performance. As aPS3e is optimized, it should quickly outpace other efforts.
It’s a small breakthrough, but I wouldn’t try to actually play any games on aPS3e, for now.
And that’s really the rub. Will this emulator continue to get optimized? The developer doesn’t have much of a track record, and considering they’ve already tried to make a quick buck by asking for ,000 (later ,000) in donations to release the source code that should already be open-source, there’s no guarantee it will continue to improve at all.
Perhaps the best outcome is that it inspires other developers to follow suit. Now that the barrier has been broken, it’s paved the way for more projects to rework RPCS3’s ARM64 binary for Android, which the RPCS3 developers themselves refuse to do. In fact, it’s already inspired the developer of the Nintendo Switch emulator Sudachi to work on a legitimate port called RPCS3droid, which is worth keeping an eye on.
Either way, I wouldn’t recommend spending a significant amount of time attempting to play games with the aPS3e PS3 emulator on Android for now. It still needs a lot more time in the oven.
