In an inevitable move, a developer has succeeded in getting Valve's Steam gaming platform running on Sony's otherwise locked-down PlayStation 4 console - but it's worth reading the full story before you get too excited.
Building on work done by the fail0verflow team in getting Linux to boot on the PC-like PlayStation 4 console, complete with 3D accelerated video courtesy of the Radeon graphics hardware built into the console's accelerated processing unit (APU), a developer calling himself OsirisX has posted a video demonstrating running Steam and Steam games directly on the PS4.
The catches, of course, are plentiful: only games compatible with SteamOS or other Linux distributions work, as the method involves the installation of Arch Linux onto the PS4 first; the performance is far from optimal, with most titles requiring the user to set the graphical quality to medium or below in order to get playable framerates; and to use the same code execution exploit, to get the Linux bootloader to run in the first place, requires that the target PS4 is running on firmware 1.76 or below.
Nevertheless, the hack shows promise for turning the PS4 into a low-cost Steam Machine. It also hearkens back to the popularity of the machine's predecessors, the PlayStation 3 and 2, for general-purpose computing tasks: both devices could run official ports of Linux, at least early in their lives, and found their way into numerous cluster computing projects thanks to their high performance for a relatively low cost.
OsirisX's video is reproduced below.
Building on work done by the fail0verflow team in getting Linux to boot on the PC-like PlayStation 4 console, complete with 3D accelerated video courtesy of the Radeon graphics hardware built into the console's accelerated processing unit (APU), a developer calling himself OsirisX has posted a video demonstrating running Steam and Steam games directly on the PS4.
The catches, of course, are plentiful: only games compatible with SteamOS or other Linux distributions work, as the method involves the installation of Arch Linux onto the PS4 first; the performance is far from optimal, with most titles requiring the user to set the graphical quality to medium or below in order to get playable framerates; and to use the same code execution exploit, to get the Linux bootloader to run in the first place, requires that the target PS4 is running on firmware 1.76 or below.
Nevertheless, the hack shows promise for turning the PS4 into a low-cost Steam Machine. It also hearkens back to the popularity of the machine's predecessors, the PlayStation 3 and 2, for general-purpose computing tasks: both devices could run official ports of Linux, at least early in their lives, and found their way into numerous cluster computing projects thanks to their high performance for a relatively low cost.
OsirisX's video is reproduced below.
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