PSSwanStation build 19

A PlayStation (PS1) emulator as a PS5 homebrew title: SwanStation, the libretro fork of DuckStation, with a controller interface of its own, drawing with Vulkan (the RADV driver, linked into the title). It needs a jailbroken console with kstuff running.

What it does

• A library for the controller: games from the title's folder, USB drives and network shares (SMB, NFS or FTP), with covers, descriptions, search, sorting and filters, favourites, and eight views (shelves, a cover grid, a list, and five that stand the covers in space; Aurora layout files work too).
• Thirty-one themes: the interface is drawn by the PS5 homebrew UI kit, each theme with its own colours, panels, type, motion and sounds, and a swan that lives in the corner.
• Every setting of the emulator, for every game or for one game alone, and the title's own: picture presets, scaling filters (sharp bilinear, FSR 1, NIS, CAS), a CRT shader, video signals, colours, film grain, what is beside a 4:3 picture, frame pacing, 120 Hz output, frame generation.
• While playing: save states with pictures, fast forward and rewind (kept in memory), cheats and patches, disc change, memory card manager with backups, button remapping and turbo, up to four players, RetroAchievements, netplay for two (an experiment).
• No BIOS needed: the built-in OpenBIOS starts most games; an original BIOS dumped from your own console is more compatible.
• Looks after itself: an updater that fetches a newer release and puts the earlier files back if it is interrupted, a safe start (hold L1 and R1), and your files kept outside the title's folder, on a USB drive or on the network share if you want.

New in build 19

• A new look. The whole interface is now drawn by BlackBearReloaded's PS5 homebrew UI kit (with mihawk-99's Vulkan backend), in thirty-one themes: PSSwanStation's own and the kit's thirty, from frosted glass to brutalist, neumorphic, pixel art and hand-drawn paper. Settings, Interface, Theme.
• Shelves, the library's new first view, after PSWin's home screen: the game under the cursor large at the top with its cover floating at the right and the cover's colours washing the screen, and shelves under it of what you played lately, your favourites and every game. The grid, the list and the views in space are all still there.
• The swan lives. It looks about, feeds, preens, stretches its wings, drifts on the water and dozes off when nothing is pressed for a while; it turns its head to the game under the cursor, starts when you scroll fast, cheers when a game starts, and a heart rises for a new favourite. It dresses for the theme (a pixel sprite in Pixel, inked in Brutal and Sketch, a wireframe in Blueprint, pastel in Candy) and the season (a scarf in winter, hats at Halloween, Christmas and New Year). Settings, Interface: Swan (lively, calm or still), Swan dresses for the theme, Seasonal touches.
• Sound: sound sets (the theme's, Glass, Paper or PSSwanStation's own), a volume for the menus' sounds, and menu music playlists: the kit's three songs, or your own .ogg, .mp3 and .wav files in music/.
• Beside the picture: "The picture's light" is now the picture itself, blurred wide and soft over the whole screen; and a new choice, "The picture carried on", continues the picture's edges outwards, blurred, so it seems to go on past its frame.
• Film grain (Picture: light, medium, strong): a fine moving grain, strongest in the middle tones.
• Tidier menus. The menu, the in-game menu and every settings page are in groups; settings that were only information are gone (the pad's battery, which the console never gives a title, among them), and the emulator's options that spoke of RetroArch use the title's words.

Everything new in builds 15 to 18 is in the build 17 and build 18 releases.

Tested for this release

Build 19 looks right on my console; NFS I have not tried there. What I have a result for one by one, and the build it was seen with:

On a PC (the same frontend on the same Vulkan code paths): for build 19, every page in five themes (dark, light, Pixel, Sketch, Brutal) and the settings page in all thirty-one, the swan's poses in every theme style and season, the library with invented games and covers, every settings page and both menus walked through, the in-game menu over a test disc, the picture's light, the extension and film grain on a test picture; for build 18, the updater's 2,450 checks and Install again through a whole install of the real build 17 ZIP. Earlier builds' PC checks are in their notes.

Known issues

• The new interface has been looked at on my console; how smooth it runs there with every theme (the frosted-glass ones blur the page each frame), how the new sounds feel and the swan's moves have not been measured one by one.
• The pages other than the library keep their layouts, in the kit's themed panels; they are not yet built from the kit's own components.
• Not every feature new since build 15 has been tried on a console one by one. Sleep-safe saving asks the console whether its menu is open over the title, a call no build has made before: if PSSwanStation stops when a game starts, switch it off. The web panel is the first time the title listens on the network for anything but netplay. Compiling a shader preset on the console may take a while and some are too slow at 4K.
• Closing the gaps draws 3D objects' outlines a quarter of a pixel fuller; a polygon edge can still show a single texel of its texture's neighbour where the PlayStation itself shows one.
• A cut detected in a fade shows the fade without made pictures between its steps (nothing moves in a fade, so nothing is lost).
• Frame generation: a thin fringe where something moves across a background that moves another way; at 20 pictures a second the made ones outnumber the game's and errors show most.
• A recording plays back the same only with the same settings, cheats and build.
• A card changed on two consoles before they met keeps the newer one without asking (the other is kept beside it as .conflict-<date>). An FTP server can hold games but not your files.
• 120 Hz output has not run on a console from this title: if the screen stays dark after choosing it, start PSSwanStation holding L1 and R1, wait ten seconds, close it and start it again.
• Netplay is an experiment that has only run between two PCs.

Install or update

1. Unpack the ZIP and copy the complete PPSA99248 folder to /data/homebrew/ on the console (FTP), so that /data/homebrew/PPSA99248/eboot.bin exists, and let your homebrew loader register it.
2. Copying over an earlier build keeps your games, saves, states, covers and settings: the ZIP holds only the program's files. From this build on, Menu, "Update" fetches the next one; builds before 18 cannot, so copy this one over by hand.
3. Your own legally obtained backups go in games/ (or on a USB drive, or a network share named in network.cfg, which the title writes with an explanation at its first start). A BIOS dumped from your own console may go in bios/. None is included, and none ever will be.
4. Once, for cheats and patches: Settings, Games and network, "Fetch the newest cheat database".
5. Read LEGAL.txt and README.txt in the folder.

Reporting problems

Say what you did, what you saw, which build (top right of the library) and which firmware. logs/ in the title's folder keeps the last two runs: copy them before starting the title again. Never attach game files, BIOS files, firmware or keys, and please leave game titles out: "a 30 fps racing game" is enough.

Source

This ZIP was built from PSSwanStation commit 94a0457e17edf7ddf0ff4eb3f27d93f2a0fb2082, which is this release's tag. The title is distributed under the GNU General Public License, version 3, as a whole. The source of every part at the revision it was built from is attached (SOURCES.txt lists the archives, SHA256SUMS their digests); licenses/ in the title's folder holds each part's licence and licenses/components.json the revisions.

Build

SHA-256 of PSSwanStation-PS5-PPSA99248-build19.zip: 7e064317d0d6c420c247f28728266c6ec3e514e176e100bfa41ed9b82f1a10ec

The interface kit's fonts (Inter, Montserrat, Press Start 2P, Patrick Hand, DejaVu Sans Mono), sounds and songs are its own, under the licences in licenses/.

PSSwanStation is an unofficial port. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Sony Interactive Entertainment, the libretro team or the DuckStation project. "PlayStation" and "PS5" are trademarks of Sony Interactive Entertainment. Vulkan is a registered trademark of the Khronos Group; the RADV port in this title is not a conformant product.