PlayStation 3 emulation has come a long way, as the development team behind RPCS3 has now announced a major update that has delivered arm64 hardware support. After months of work making the emulator run natively on arm64 devices, Linux and macOS support is now available, with an official Windows release also on the way.
The developers released two showcase videos to reveal the new platforms. The first reveals Apple Silicon native support in action, comparing its performance to Apple's Rosetta2 x64 translator, seen above. But much more impressive is the Raspberry Pi demo, seen below.
Loaded up with Arch Linux, an overclocked Raspberry Pi 5 can play PlayStation 3 games despite its GPU (Broadcom VideoCore VII) being several times weaker than the original Sony hardware. The development team still managed to run PlayStation 3 games at 272p 30 FPS with the Raspberry Pi 5, akin to a PlayStation Portable.
Due to the lack of compatible hardware within the development team, the emulator is only able to run homebrew games on Windows arm64 devices. Until the developers manage to get their hands on some Windows on ARM machines, commercial titles will have issues with the emulator.
A deep dive on how exactly the RPCS3 team dived into providing support for the new platform, the hurdles it had to surpass, and current status of support can be found on its new [arm65-focused blog post here](https://rpcs3.net/blog/2024/12/09/introducing-rpcs3-for-arm64/).
While some may be expecting the PlayStation 3 emulator to now jump to the mobile side of things, the development team has confirmed that this is not a target of its efforts.
"We are disallowing Android and iOS discussion in our communities," says a statement by the team, citing massive amount of toxicity that are spawned from these subjects. "We have no intention of porting RPCS3 to these platforms at this time, so no discussion on these topics is needed."
RPCS3 Linux arm64 and macOS arm64 binaries are now available for download from the emulator website's [official downloads section here](https://rpcs3.net/download). They can be found alongside the previous Windows x64, Linux x64, macOS x64 and FreeBSD x64 builds. However, the still incomplete Windows arm64 binaries will need to be compiled locally by users for now.