Another progress report is up for RPCS3, the PlayStation 3 Emulator

The volunteers behind the status updates of the PlayStation 3 Emulator RPCS3 have a new report available, with RPCS3 now up to 1,431 titles playable which is amazing.

Many graphical improvements made it in once again, like multiple upgrades to how they handle RSX (the PS3 GPU). This has resulted in a much better experience in games like NieR which no longer has a bad flickering Bloom effect, plus multiple post-processing effects were improved and the difference as you can see below is huge:

Multiple rendering optimisations were also added in too resulting in a reduction in the load on the GPU and CPU and also reducing the memory footprint of smaller textures. Their MSAA implementation was also improved even further, to prevent transparency issues in titles like Metal Gear Solid 2 & 3.

The same contributor who worked on getting many PlayStation 3 accessories supported came back, to work on extended USB support for games that used "cellUsbd", which (going by what they said) basically let games bypass PS3 libraries used to directly communicate with USB devices plugged in. This work has now been merged, further expanding what's possible with RPCS3 and while it's not entirely finished it does mean it's now possible to use things like the Skylanders Portal along with its figures.

As for other game improvements: Thor: God of Thunder can get in-game now, Top Spin 3 is playable at full speed plus NCAA Football 2011 and NCAA Football 2012 can be played nicely now without audio issues. No doubt there's others now playable that haven't yet been tested with all the improvements.

Fantastic work from everyone hacking away at it, always nice to see older platforms being kept alive with cross-platform open source software like this. Especially as thousands of games will likely never be seen again, unless emulators like this help to never fully lose them.

You can see the update here, which is for September but they're really far behind due to not enough people helping to go over all the progress. Details in the link on how to help.