Popular PS3 emulator RPCS3 now has Arm64 support to play on tiny-looking Raspberry Pi 5

Big news for PlayStation 3 nostalgia-loving folks. RPCS3, the popular PS3 emulator, now offers an Arm64 support.

This new support for Arm64 lets the emulator run natively on Linux, macOS, and Windows devices for this architecture, like the MacBook Air and Pro with M1 chips & above, as well as the Microsoft Surface Pro X, to name a few.

The open-source emulator began its development in 2021 amid Apple’s M1 series hype. So with that, this enables successful performance revamps so that more commercial PS3 games can run on various Arm64 platforms. RPCS3 also now supports automatic builds for macOS and Linux arm64, and even Windows on ARM.

While the tiny-looking $80-priced Raspberry Pi 5 is not a high-performance gaming device, the emulator can run PS3 games at a maximum of 30FPS with graphics resembling those of a PSP’s 480p display. Honestly, not the best, but it works nonetheless although it can’t render games at the PS3’s native 720p resolution.

Raspberry Pi 5 arrived in September 2023. The premise of that device was a more powerful and versatile computing experience with faster processing speed, more memory, and better multimedia capabilities.

At launch, Raspberry Pi 5 had a price tag of as low as $60 for the 4GB variant and $80 for 8GB, featuring a 2.4GHz quad-core Cortex-A76 CPU, VideoCore VII GPU, dual 4Kp60 HDMI outputs, Bluetooth 5.0, and a Gigabit Ethernet port.

It’s been a week for nostalgia gamers. Celebrating the three decades since the first PlayStation console dropped, Sony launched a temporary theme of the iconic PS1 boot screen for PS5 users.

Besides that, the Japanese tech giant also launched retro-looking PS5, PS Portal, and DualSense controllers with vintage touches. There are also discounts for over 500 games to celebrate the anniversary.