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Page: I. Quick start [Users]
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Home I. Quick start [Users] II. Setting up shadPS4 [Users] III. Guide of＜Critical＞log IV. Helping development [Users] V. FAQ VI. Emulator Design [Devs] VII. Contributing [Devs] VIII. Devtools [Devs]
9 I. Quick start [Users]
kalaposfos13 edited this page 2025-06-10 21:50:21 +02:00
Table of Contents

Quick start

This guide gives you the basics for installing the emulator in the best possible conditions, including all the pre-requisites for launching a game.

Warning

The emulator is still experimental, so many errors and impossibility to play are possible.

1. Requirements

1.1 Minimum System Requirements

CPU

  • A processor with at least 4 cores and 6 threads
  • Above 2.5 GHz frequency
  • A CPU supporting the x86-64-v3 baseline.
    • Intel: Haswell generation or newer
    • AMD: Excavator generation or newer
    • Apple: Rosetta 2 on macOS 15.4 or newer

GPU

  • A graphics card with at least 1GB of VRAM
  • Vulkan 1.3 with the VK_KHR_swapchain and VK_KHR_push_descriptor extensions

RAM

  • 8GB of RAM or more

OS

  • At least Windows 10, Ubuntu 22.04, or macOS 15.4

1.2 Required Drivers

Before proceeding, update your drivers:

  1. Find out which brand of graphics card you use.
  2. Download the appropriate one for your operating system:
  3. You should also check that your iGPU is up to date using the links above.
  4. For Windows user: Don't trust Windows update especially for iGPU.

2. Installation

2.1 Download shadPS4

Tip

For a quick start, we will use the QT version. QT means that the emulator comes with a GUI that makes it easy to use and configure.
The other way is SDL but we will not use it for now.

  1. Follow this link: https://github.com/shadps4-emu/shadPS4/releases
  2. You can decide between two release version:
  • Pre-release-xxx (Also known as "Nightly", this is the last release)
  • Release (Latest major release, eg 0.5.0)
  1. Click on ⏵ Asserts, you're going to see a lot of differents versions you need to locate the one containing your OS (win64, linux, macos) and the word QT.
    For example, if you want the latest version for Windows, click on shadps4-win64-qt-xxxx-xx-xx-xxxxxxx.zip.

2.2 Move & Extract it

  1. Move your newly downloaded archive to the folder of your choice. It can be everywhere
  2. Extract it (Using built-in app or app like winrar, 7z, etc...)

For Windows:

  1. First, you will need Microsoft Visual C++ 2022 to run it.
    Download it from here: https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.x64.exe and install it before next step
  2. Open the folder newly extracted and run shadPS4.exe.
    The first time, Windows will maybe ask you about security, you can agree.

For Linux:

  1. Open the folder newly extracted.
  2. Start Shadps4-qt.AppImage.

For macOS:

  1. Open the folder newly extracted.
  2. A window should pop up with the text shadps4 Not Opened, tap on Done.
  3. Navigate to the Apple icon on the top left of your screen and tap on it. In the newly appeared menu there is an option called System Settings, tap on it.
  4. After the System Settings application has been opened, navigate to the Privacy & Security tab and scroll down in the new opened tab till you see the message shadps4 was blocked to protect your Mac
  5. On the right side of the message, there is a button called Open Anyway, tap on it.
  6. A new window should pop up which says Open shadps4? , tap on the Open Anyway button and enter your password or use your fingerprint to confirm.

3. Install games and updates

Caution

Games and its updates are copyrighted content and must be dumped from your *own* copy of the game.

The emulator is now started. Now you want to install your first game(s).

  1. Use a dumper tool (app/payload) on your jailbroken PS4 to extract your game to a external media storage. ItemzFlow is recommended for dumping both games and updates.
  2. Prepare your game dump by making sure the folder has the right name format: CUSAxxxxx (where xxxxx is the game's serial).
    Most dumping payloads already do this, if the folder name already has this format, skip to step 3.
  3. Find the game installation folder provided on first boot. This can be found on the settings.
  4. Take your dump and copy it to the game installation folder.
  5. Once finished, the game should appear in the UI.

The process for installing updates is the same:

  1. Prepare your dump of the game update by making sure the folder has the right name format: CUSAxxxxx-patch/CUSAxxxxx-UPDATE
    Most dumping payloads already do this, if the folder name already has this format, skip to step 2.
  2. Once finished, the update should be recognized in the UI.

4. Adding modules

shadPS4 can load some modules in:

  • LLE mode: Low Level Emulation: Using the firmware files of the console directly;
  • HLE mode: High Level Emulation: Providing a reimplementation for the original module in the emulator source code.

For some of the modules, it is necessary to process them in HLE. For others, they can be replaced by these supported modules and must be placed under user/sys_modules folder. Tested FW modules are from 11.00. Some of the firmware libraries have to be emulated, some of them not necessarily have to, but already have a full HLE implementation, but some libraries don't have working reimplementations yet, but can be loaded LLE. The modules below can be dumped from your console and added to shadPS4 to greatly increase game compatibility, and make emulation better. The goal is to eventually not have to rely on firmware modules at all, but there's still a long way to go to achieve that.

Modules
libSceCesCs.sprx libSceFont.sprx libSceFontFt.sprx libSceFreeTypeOt.sprx
libSceJson.sprx libSceJson2.sprx libSceLibcInternal.sprx libSceNgs2.sprx
libSceRtc.sprx libSceUlt.sprx

To dump your system modules, enable an FTP Server on your PS4, open an FTP Client on your computer (like FileZilla), connect to your PS4 by adding its IP Address and the port to the FTP server, then navigate to /system/common/lib/. Now dump the modules on your PC. It is recommended to dump all modules in the folder in case some are supported in the future, but you can also dump only the ones listed below. Once they're dumped you can place them in the sys_modules folder located either in your user folder in your shadPS4 install or in your operating system's default config folder.

5. Configure the emulator

Congratulations, your emulator has all the files needed to run your games!
You can now start to configure the emulator settings here.