It’s been a while since emulation enthusiasts have heard anything about Spine, a PlayStation 4 emulator exclusive to Linux, but its developers surfaced this week with a surprise update that adds support for many games.
Before anyone gets excited, the compatibility list doesn’t include anything along the lines of Ghost of Tsushima or God of War, but it does feature some recognizable games such as Persona 5 Royal. Most of the games appear to be 2D titles.
Spine may not be the only PS4 emulator in existence, but it seems to be the most successful at running commercial titles. Others include Orbital, which hasn’t been released to the public yet, and GPCS4, which works on Windows but only supports a single game called We Are Doomed, an indie twin-stick shooter.
Spine is a PS4 emulator running on Linux, that is generally considered to be in private development, but a demo has been available for some time. According to its developer, it is the first publicly available PS4 emulator to be able to launch commercial games, compared to other work in progress such as Orbital.
The full list of compatible titles for Spine can be found here. There are nearly 1,000 games listed, but it seems to include a large number of titles that don’t work at all (“nothing”).
Spine is currently closed-source. According to developer Zecoxao, this is to prevent dilution of the emulators development.