PlayStation 4 is Bringing Console Gaming Streaming To PC and Mac

Sony PlayStation is the bestselling gaming console of the current generation devices. The PlayStation 4 has maintained its superiority over competitors like Xbox and Nintendo by regularly offering big updates that improve the user’s gaming experience. Today marks another big step towards improving console gaming. Sony has revealed that the upcoming PS4 firmware update will make PS4 playable on PCs and Macs via streaming. Currently, the streaming feature called Remote Play can also stream games on the PS TV and PS Vita.

Those familiar with Sony products must be aware that Sony offers a Remote Play feature for its Sony Xperia devices. The feature allows those with Xperia products to stream PlayStation games to their phone or tablet over WiFI and play them via the standard PlayStation controller.

The upcoming version 3.50 software update for PS4 will add the ability to “Remote Play” PS4 games on a home computer, effectively turning a laptop or desktop with mediocre specs to a remote PlayStation powered gaming machine.

Not so long ago, Microsoft announced that Xbox One gamers will be able to stream games to PC thanks to the updated Xbox app. That feature was, for obvious reasons, limited to Microsoft Windows PCs and not Apple devices. This new announcement is just in time to nullify Microsoft’s superior feature.

This addition is not a reply to Microsoft’s screen sharing feature. President of Sony Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida, had made the announcement a while back. In November last year, he tweeted “Some people asked if we plan to provide Remote Play function to PC, and yes, we are indeed working on an official application for PC/Mac”.

Sony says the feature will not be available in the beta release of the 3.50 update. So early adopters won’t be able to test the feature in advance. However, the company’s blog post says “you can look forward to it soon”.

There are several others inclusions in the major update. It brings online friends notifications, which will let the gamers know when their friends are online to play games. To complement the feature, users will now be able to appear offline (invisible) when they are gaming alone or busy with something else. The Play Together feature will allow friends to join game parties or start new games together in more simpler manner.

Sony’s also bringing scheduled updates to PS4 which will make the process of organising future game meetups much easier. Dailymotion is being added to the Share feature and users will be able to check their storage using PlayStation Plus. Sadly, there is still no support for external storage devices.

The beta version of the update has been released while the stable release should be coming soon after.

Playstation 4 Gets Hacked & Run Linux & Pokemon

It was only a matter of time before Sony’s next generation console PlayStation 4 was hacked.Fail0verflow was the team responsible for carrying out the feat, by getting Gentoo Linux on the console too.

The team demonstrated Linux on the PlayStation 4 at the 32nd Chaos Communication Congress (which is an event widely known as 32c3) on December 30, 2015.

How Dis Fail0verFlow Manage to Accomplish the Feat?

The hacking group managed to find a vulnerability in the PlayStation 4 gaming console by bringing up the Settings option, as this is the place where the Linux kernel-based operating system is launched.

Afterwards, the group managed to navigate to the User’s Guide section, where they were able to locate the vulnerability and successfully hack the console. Another reason why the team was successfully able to hack the machine was because there was a broken NOP command on the integrated AMD Radeon GPU. NOP, or No Operation, is used for timing purposes, and present to prevent further delay when launching the gaming application and the team were able to notice this, albeit with a small amount of effort.

Here is the group running a modified Pokémon ROM dubbed ‘PlayStation version’ on the PS4 via Linux.

What Works, and What Doesn't?

After the hack, the following components and instructions present on the motherboard remained functional:

• Timers
• IRQs (interrupt request)
• PCI
• Serial port
• Framebuffer
• Kernel mode setting
• HDMI encoder
• Ethernet
• Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth
• S/PDIF audio

3D hardware acceleration, USB ports, and the HDMI audio port did not respond after completing the hacking process, but the group has stated that they have figured out a way to make these three things work as well. As for the Blu-Ray disk read, Fail0verflow are still making an effort in order to make it work.

Does it seem like the PS4 will get hacked to run pirated games and backups? This development has certainly got everyone thinking about such a possibility in the near future.