PS3 emulator reaches new milestone in quest to run every game made on platform

Work on PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 has reached a major milestone, with every game ever released on the console now successfully booting.

Spotted by Kotaku, the RPCS3 team announced that all known games and apps from the PS3 now, at the very least, will boot using the emulator. That accounts for more than 6000 applications total.

While a significant achievement, a bootable game is a long way away from running on the emulator as you would expect i.e. actually being able to play the game.

RPCS3 has five tiers in its compatibility list, with 'Playable' the only tier which denotes a game that runs and performs as expected. So far, just 63 percent of games fall into this category, where they are actually fully playable to the point they can be completed.

"We're delighted to announce that RPCS3 now has a total of ZERO games in the Nothing status!" the RPCS3 team wrote on Twitter. "This means that all known games and applications at least boot on the emulator, with no ongoing regressions that prevent games from booting. We look forward to emptying out Loadable too!"

Still, the fact RPCS3 has come this far is commendable. The PS3's Cell architecture is notoriously complex and adapting it to work on standard PC hardware is no small feat.