Affiliate links on Android Authority may earn us a commission. Learn more.
There's bad news if you want the best PS3 emulator to come to Android
- The developers behind the RPCS3 PS3 emulator have announced ports of the app to Arm-based devices running MacOS, Linux, and Windows.
- Unfortunately, the team has also confirmed that it has no intention of porting the emulator to Android and iOS right now.
- The developers cited various issues, such as toxic users and the proliferation of scam apps posing as RPCS3.
RPCS3 is easily the best PlayStation 3 emulator, and it’s been available on Windows and Linux for years now. The emulator was initially restricted to the x64 architecture (e.g. computers powered by Intel and AMD chips), but that changed this week.
The RPCS3 team has announced that native versions of the PS3 emulator are now available on Arm-based devices running MacOS, Linux, and Windows on Arm.
The good news is that the native MacOS version shows a huge performance improvement over the x64 version running under translation. The native Windows on Arm app was hamstrung by a lack of hardware for testing, although the team expects this to be less of an issue thanks to the growing number of commercial Snapdragon X PCs on the market. Nevertheless, the developers explain that homebrew games should work fine while commercial titles will likely run into issues due to Windows on Arm mandating the ASLR feature.
An Android port isn’t coming (for now?)
Arm support opens the door to discussions about the feasibility of an Android or iOS port of the PS3 emulator. Unfortunately, the team has ruled out this possibility.
The developers specifically cited various community issues with previous Android emulators. These include dealing with “toxic users” who have previously harassed other emulator developers, and entities redistributing modified versions of the emulator while ignoring open-source licenses.
Would you pay for RPCS3 on your Android device?
Unfortunately, the RPCS3 team also pointed to scam apps and Google’s apparent failure to deal with them:
We are also aware of the increase of scam applications that portray themselves as a PlayStation 3 emulator while being malware, or that redistribute RPCS3 under a different name and claim it is a new emulator. Some of them are even vetted in Google’s Play Store. Unfortunately Google haven’t acted on the reports we have made, and these scam apps continue to be exposed to users.
“For these reasons, we are disallowing Android and iOS discussion in our communities. We have no intention of porting RPCS3 to these platforms at this time, so no discussion on these topics is needed,” the team explained in its blog, once again pointing to the “high toxicity” of some people in the Android community.
That’s a real shame, especially when we’ve seen massive strides being made with projects like Winlator. Nevertheless, we can totally understand not wanting to be subjected to harassment and shady developers effectively stealing your code.