RPCS3

RPCS3
is an emulator for PlayStation 3 games.
Installation
Install
rpcs3-git
AUR
or
rpcs3-bin
AUR
.
To be able to actually run games, the PlayStation 3 system software is required, as indicated in the
quickstart guide
. Fortunately it is easy to acquire this firmware compared with other Sony systems like the PlayStation 2. Sony even provides the files online, so it is not necessary to dump anything.
Download
the
PS3UPDAT.PUP
file by clicking on the big button.
After installing RPCS3, open it and go to
File
>
Install Firmware
, then choose the downloaded file.
Configuration
In order to play games comfortably, a
gamepad
should be present. In the most optimal case, it is an original PlayStation 3 controller. Other gamepads are supported as well, make sure
Handlers
is set to
evdev
under the menu entry
Pads
.
Installing games
Note
Make sure to use an unmodified game dump. See the RPCS3 Wiki article
Validating PlayStation 3 game dumps
for instructions on checking the validity of a game dump.
RPCS3 stores its data in
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/rpcs3
. More game directories can be added. It differentiates between disc dumps and downloaded (PSN) games. Put disc dumps into the
disc
directory and the downloaded ones into the
game
directory.
The usual way of running games is pointing rpcs3 to the directory or installing it, if it is a
.pkg
file.
The difference between downloads and disc dumps
Downloaded games (or other content, such as DLCs) usually consist of only two files, a key (or license) and the actual game. The key is usually contained in a tiny
.rap
file, the game is much bigger in size, usually around 10-15 gigabytes. Put both files into
game dir/
name of the game
.
name of the game
is purely cosmetic, as this directory only exists so that the files, which may have random names, do not make the directory listing unreadable.
Disc dumps contain many files and can easily identified by the
PS3_GAME
directory in it.
PS3_GAME/ICON0.png
and
PS3_GAME/PIC1.png
contain the icon and background for that specific game.
Troubleshooting
Enabling the debug menu
Unfortunately many games are still not fully playable and require workarounds. Since not all settings that are visible by default will help with glitches and other bugs, some important configuration is done in the debug menu. See the
RPCS3 FAQ
on how to enable the debug menu.
The main window looks odd with a system-wide dark theme
Users which configured their environment to use dark themes may have problems with the default theme. Go to
Config
>
GUI
and choose a different theme.
Graphics suddenly pop in when compiling shaders
Go to
Config
>
GPU
and set
Shader Mode
to
Async with Shader Interpreter
.
This can help with situations where it takes a while to fully compile the shaders. Objects are invisible until their shader is compiled, which can ruin the fun of e.g cutscenes.
Weird graphics errors
If the game once worked perfectly and suddenly stopped working after starting it, clear the cache. It is usually found in
$XDG_CACHE_HOME/rpcs3
and is safe to remove. This location only contains logs and other things that can be regenerated without problems, like compiled shaders and PPU modules. Removing this will cause the next startup to be slower.
Note
This does not apply if it stopped working after an update.
Regressions
are possible and should be reported.
Increasing RLIMIT_MEMLOCK
Failed to set RLIMIT_MEMLOCK size to 2 GiB. Try to update your system configuration
Install
realtime-privileges
and add your own user to the
realtime
user group
.
See also
Official website
RPCS3 Wiki
https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/RPCS3
https://github.com/RipleyTom/rpcn