Development isn't continuing...why?
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I've been following for some time and notice that development attempts hasn't been made really and commits now and mostly (empty) commits or merges that don't add much to PS4EMX. Is the project ever going to get anywhere or is it over possibly?
Well, I've been really busy lately but I've been managing to get some time working on some stuff for memory manager since emulating PS4's memory is a bitch, mostly because the entire emulated memory map ranges has to be altered depending on game code. I don't know about anyone else though
Is it possible to create functional PS4 emulator by emulating OS alone ? Or by converting PS4 executable to other x86 OS ?
No, not by just enabling the OS to run in a virtual environment because they are compiled with shaders for the custom GPU. Plus, the binaries are encrypted and might depend on dynamic linkage ... what can be done is run Orbis OS in a virtual environment that emulates GPU functions in a memory range that can be altered based on the game. But still having issues with decrypting
Development is continuing, but @ghaststeam hasn't updated the repository with anything and he's the one who's apparently writing the hypervisor for Orbis OS. I don't know much about anything else, but I was going to implement an ARM recompiler for the Mediacon.
I thank the issue is that this is project of an emu when ps4 uses x86 as well as target development platforms so emulating everything including x86 would be tremendous overhead and bottlenecks.
Yeah, I get that but there's no emulation specific code yet ... or at least not much. Why is that exactly?
From what I know the program is supposed to be split into two parts; full emulation and full virtualization(with emulation as well). Since the PS4 OS is x86-64 (or AMD64) it can run as a guest OS using virtualization, emulating only the necessary functions of the GPU and from what I know. Since the PS4 games run on the PS4 OS, the games should work when OS does. If that doesn't work separate options will need to be considered, namely, playing the games without relying on the PS4 OS or such. I'm not sure exactly how that should be done and afaik only @ghaststeam has even conceived of taking this program that far. But it can be multi-faceted: full emulation, part emulation/part virtualization, may run the OS/may just run games, etc. x86-64 multi-core emulation is not much of a mystery and a lot of the heavy lifting can be working off of Bochs and can be done pretty quickly. Ask @bellysaga about that.