This is going to be a comprehensive,
straightforward guide on how to emulate PlayStation 3 games on your Mac.
It's going to cover quite a bit of ground, so I recommend watching it about 1.25 x and using the
chapters to skip around. I've also included all the links I use in this video in the description,
so please check those out. Before we get into this, we need to talk about the state
of PlayStation 3 emulation. The PlayStation 3 is a fairly recent console. Many games are only
in a rough playable State, unlike, say, the Gamecube or PlayStation 2 emulation,
where the games often run a lot better than playing them on the native hardware.
For this demo, I'll be purposely using games that are known to work well. The emulator is
under active development, meaning updates are happening all the time and improving
the compatibility with games and performance. I made a video about PlayStation 2 emulation,
and I recommend this to most users as the experience is a lot better,
the emulator is a lot more mature, and the hardware requirements are a lot less.
This is not to say that you can't have enjoyable experiences using rpcs3, so let's get into this.
The first thing you'll want to do is download our rpcs3, so punch that into your search bar,
and you should find the website. Make sure it's the official website rpcs3.net
Next, go to download. Scroll down to the Mac now. You'll see right now this is unavailable that's
because the build isn't available. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, so what we'll do instead
is scroll down to view previous builds because this is not available. It looks like you can
see here this is grayed out, but from one day ago, the Mac version is available, so we'll click that,
and it will download. Now that it's downloaded, it's time to install it. Double-click the DMG,
and we just drag this into the applications folder once in the applications folder. If we
try and double-click this, we'll probably see an error here. This error occurs when the code
is not signed, meaning the developer hasn't paid Apple to verify the signing process.
This is pretty normal when it comes to open-source software, so there's nothing
to be worried about. Just click cancel, and instead, we right-click and then click open,
and now we can verify this and whitelist it. We only have to do this once, so let's click open,
and now we can just open the application like normal the first run will take a few moments
before it launches. The first time you launch the emulator, you'll be greeted by this screen.
Its entire purpose is to direct you to the quick start guide, which is actually a useful document.
I highly recommend that you thumb through this guide as it does contain quite a bit of useful
information. For the sake of time, let's say I have read this guide, and I do not need to see
this again and click continue, and now we're at the RPC S3 screen, the very first thing
we'll want to do is install the firmware, so the PlayStation 3's firmware is actually distributed
on the internet from legal websites like Tech spots so we will search TechSpot PS3 firmware.
It should be the first one we can go here. Just click download now, which will take us here, and
it will take a second for it to start downloading. Once the firmware is done downloading,
we'll go back to rpcs3 and click this install firmware option. Mine is in the downloads folder,
and you'll see that the name doesn't quite match what's right here. We'll just select all pup
files now. I should be able to select this. Click open. What do you know? It worked now.
I have the PlayStation 3 firmware installed. Click ok
when you click OK, you might start seeing the screen and let it run. This is a good
enough time as any to talk about an important concept with this emulator because you'll see
this screen quite a bit. The term compiling PPU refers to the process of converting the
low-level machine code of the power processing unit, the PPU, into executable code that can
be run on your computer CPU. The PPU is the main processor of the Sony PlayStation 3.
This translation process is known as dynamic recompiling or jit compilation. This task
requires a significant amount of processing power, and the performance of your computer
will affect the speed and efficiency of this process. The first time you run a game in rpcs3,
there will be delays as the emulator creates a cache of the compiled code. This cache helps
speed up the subsequent launches of the same game by reusing the pre-compiled code reducing the need
for recompilation. What this means is the first time you launch a game, it will be kind of slower.
Now that the firm where is installed, let's configure our Gamepad first and connect your
Gamepad to your computer I'm using a PlayStation 4 controller. This, of course, will require
the correct cabling from the main screen. Click the paths button now you'll notice that you see
handlers here. This is going to be the option we want to change. I am using a Dualshock 4,
so I'm going to select that. Now we can confirm that this is working if we scroll down and we
start playing with our analog sticks. You can see these dots moving. You can even adjust the
dead zone if your sticks drift a little bit further, so if you see this Dot and
for whatever reason if it was out here, this would be indicating stick drift, and you could
increase the dead zone here and the same thing can be said for the triggers you can increase
the dead zones on those as well so I'm going to click save because everything's good to go.
Hey, while editing this video, I noticed I didn't point out something important, and
that is the devices right here showing you what gamepads are plugged in right now. I only have one
PlayStation 4 controller plugged in. If I unplug it, it goes to disconnected, but if I replug it
in and I don't see it, then I click refresh. Now it's back. This is how you would handle multiple
controllers if you went to player two and you had another dual shock, and it was plugged in. You
could assign it to the second pad and so forth for players three, four, five, six, and seven.
If you have a non-Playstation controller, you can always configure it manually. It's a bit tedious,
but here's how it worked to see the select button is assigned to the share button. If
I wanted to assign this, I'd click it with my mouse, and then I have five seconds in
our input. I'm going to reassign it back to the share button, and you would do that for
every single option you see here in my previous video about the PlayStation 2. A lot of people
asked about using a mouse and keyboard to play games instead of using a controller,
and I highly recommend getting a controller because guess what? Most games make use of
these guys, and a mouse and keyboard simply won't cut it'll be a bad experience. Adding
and installing games is not as straightforward as you would think if I were just to click this
open button and go to my desktop where I have some PS3 games, and I was to try and launch,
say, Burnout Paradise, and I click open you'll get this error message.
Now let's try this again because we need to know how these games were actually backed up so if I go
to my desktop and I look at these PS3 games, we'll see that the Burnout Paradise has these two files
a package file and a DOT wrap file so we'll go back here and since these are packages and wraps,
we'll go here using shift-click select both click open it'll take a second to install the game,
and we can click ok now we have this game added to our game library. This is not true of all games.
If I go to the Red Dead Redemption, I'll notice this has a PS3 game folder now.
If I were to do this, I could boot this game by going here and selecting the folder, and clicking
open immediately. It'll start launching the game rather than launching this game. We're gonna close
it out now. It's very important to understand the difference between these two distribution
models games that are distributed as dot rap and Dot package files are installed directly
to the virtual hard drive for the PlayStation 3. Games that are disk images or ones that
are distributed as a series of folders are best thought of as Blu-ray copies of the game. You can
delete the package and .rap file once you're done installing the game, whereas, for games
that are disk images like this Red Dead Redemption game, you cannot delete these files.
Now for a quick disclaimer on software piracy downloading PlayStation 3 games
off the internet is not legal. I happen to own physical copies of all the games I'm
demonstrating in this video, but I did download them off the internet as I use
my moral compass and figured that I could have performed the backups on my own time.
I will not be responding to any comments asking for where to download games because,
again, this is software piracy, and you can buy these games from a lot of retailers to this day.
so anyhow, back to the main program
Before we launch any of the games, we'll want to click on config.
Most of the options aren't going to be useful for the average user self-included here. You
can also specify the Default Resolution, and this affects when you first launch a game. It's
best to leave it at 720p, which is recommended and then adjusts over here if you have a really
beefy GPU. You probably can get away with even upscaling games to 4K, but let's just go back
down to 1080p because the M1 Max, as good as it is, is not going to really get away with that.
We're almost to the point where we're playing games, but there are a few more things we should
take care of right now. You've probably noticed by now this compatibility column
says the database is missing. We can easily fix this by right-clicking and then selecting.
Download the compatibility database. It'll take a few moments to download
Once finished, you'll see the compatibility section is now filled out. This will give us
a ballpark estimation of how well a game will run if it's in-game,
it probably has some severe glitches and might even crash, and we're still not quite done yet.
The next thing we will want to do is go to manage and go to game patches,
and it'll take a second for the dialogue to pop up and click yes, then click OK we'll want to
filter this down to only our own games game patches allow for fixes to games.
Not every game has them, but these will often drastically improve the game itself,
so if we go here, we can enable these different patches like aspect ratio and disable motion blur.
How about we skip the intro and unlock the frames per second hell, why not let's just make ourselves
invincible, and then we can click save now when we play Red Dead Redemption? It will have those
various patches enabled. Notice that Burnout Paradise says that it has an update available.
I've already downloaded the update for this game, so I'm going to go here back
to the install packages. If I go to my desktop, I have this update file that I'm going to apply,
so I just select this package file, and I click open, and I click yes, and now I've updated my
game to the latest version, now we're finally ready to launch a game so I'm going to double
click on Ridge Racer 7, and I've already launched this game before so it will go a lot faster.
I'll make it full screen by clicking here, and if I want to exit full screen, I can just click
the skate button depending on the game, and your computer performance will vary quite a bit if you
don't have an Apple silicon Mac or a computer with a dedicated GPU you might be out of luck you can
always try lowering some of the graphics options like decreasing the Shader quality and disabling
anti-aliasing now let's talk about one of the best features in emulation which is save states.
Let's say I get to a place in a game where I want to save, but the game doesn't offer a
save function. For this example, I'm going to go back to the main menu, and then I'm going
to go to utilities, and then select Create Save State. Now if I right-click this game,
I can boot with Save State. This will resume the game exactly where I left off, and that means
skipping even the boot screens. Unfortunately, in my experience, this is pretty glitchy especially
compared to other emulators, but perhaps when you watch this video, this feature will work properly.
Now it's time to talk about where these games are stored as they're quite large,
you'll want to go to your user directory, and then you're going to want to go to your library.
This might be hidden by default, so you'll need to go to view and then go to show view options
while looking at this window and make sure your show Library folder is checked. Then from there,
it's application support, and then it's rpcs3. Now we're viewing the directory.
I'm going to hit command J to bring up the show view options. I'm going to calculate all sizes,
and I can see that the dev underscore HDD 0 is using 30 gigabytes. If I expand this,
I can see the games folder, and then inside here, we can see various games.
If I expand this one and then look at this picture, I can tell that this is God of War.
I can manually delete games from here, say I don't want God of War, and then I hit refresh over here.
It is now gone and uninstalled. The next piece of this is if you ever want to DNC install rps3,
you need to delete all its Associated files, including all this stuff in application
support. The easiest way to do this is to use a helper application like app cleaner,
so if I double click app cleaner, go to rpcs3 drag it onto that window, we can now see all
the associated files, including this very large rps3 folder that was in application support.
So if I go in here, this is the same folder we are looking at before. This is how you fully delete
rpcs3 off your computer now to talk about game saves if you go to manage, you can see saved data.
If you click this, you will see a list of all your saved games. You can delete the games from here,
or if you click view folder, you can see where the game saves lives. This allows you to copy
and paste this manually to backup or install game saves that someone else has created.
Just be aware that Save Game data doesn't always work cross-compatibility between
versions of a game, so make sure that your game save data that
you're backing up or restoring from is the same version of that game.
One of the most important resources when using RPCS3 is the official website. If
I go to the compatibility Tab and click that, and I scroll down, I can search for
any game. Let's look at Uncharted, and C is compatibility. If we click here,
we scroll down. We can see the compatibility with all the different versions of Uncharted.
So let's go to Uncharted among Thieves. Click that it'll bring up a Wiki page that has a lot
of information about running this game, including configuration settings that are
recommended. This resource is incredibly important. There's one thing to take away
from this video use this Wiki. Keep in the back of your mind that this is always improving. A
game like Ridge Racer 7 looks great, whereas GoldenEye 007 reloaded is a little freaky
alright that covers the basics of PlayStation 3 emulation on the Mac. If you're looking for
something else to watch, I recommend my video tutorial on PlayStation 2 emulation,
I mentioned that before, and I also have another one on using OpenEmu to emulate arcade games as
well I even have some retro Max stuff like how to emulate Mac OS 9 on Apple silicon
so check those out they'll be on the screen and also in the description of this video.