Demon’s Souls / <span class="caps">RPCS3</span>

Demon’s Souls

My first exposure to “Souls” series, and to an extent the legendary Hidetaka Miyazaki although I had played some of the Armored Core games I’m not sure if he was responsible for those as well.

Demon’s Souls was the only game I bought with my PS3, although I would go on to buy it several times over. I’d end up lending my copies to people only to never have them returned, and finally ended up buying it on the PSN so I could have it on the hard drive and never have to worry about having to buy it again.

A pattern that repeated itself with the PS4 and Bloodborne I should have known better than to buy disc copies of games. I managed to play through all the Dark Souls on PC with Steam so I never had to worry about lending my discs out to friends this way :)

This game and series was hard, atmospheric, cryptic and very unforgiving and quickly became one of my favorite games and it absolutely still holds up.

Now I know I’m probably late to the party, as it seems it’s been working with RPCS3 for quite some time now, and there’s even now RPCN a free alternative to the PSN network, which allows playing with friends / random folks on the internet.

With the recent re-release of Demon’s Souls for the PS5 (and not having a PS5), I was kinda getting that itch in the back of my head to get into the souls world. And what better way than to be able to play it on my PC. Sure beats having to dig out my PS3 from some packing boxes, and then having no one to play it with online.

RPCS3

So apparently PS3 emulation is now a thing and quite stable it seems, they have a quite big list of compatible games however Demon’s Souls is likely one of the only games worth emulating since most “good” PS3 games aren’t exclusives to the system, but are playable already on the PC.

I’m going to cover how I got RPCS3 installed and configured on Arch Linux, if for some reason you need distro specific commands let me know.

Build

RPCS3 is available as an AUR, so if you followed my previous post on how to build AUR’s in a chroot, this will come in handy. As I used the chroot to build an optimized version for my system. I just ran make_package in the rpcs3 directory, however if you don’t have a similar alias or command you can use the below commands.

First were going to snag the PKGBUILD by using git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/rpcs3.git.

cd rpcs3
makechrootpkg -c -r $CHROOT

You may want to export the following command to your environment prior to building the RPCS3 package, as by default it’s setup to only use 1 core while compiling which will only take 1 universe heat death to compile.

export MAKEFLAGS="-j$(nproc)"

The above command nproc will give you the number of cores available on your CPU, and you can specify how many you want to dedicate to the build.

Installation

Once your build is finished, you should be left with a rpcs3-0.0.14-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst in the current directory. And you can install it with install_package or the following command.

sudo pacman -U --asdeps rpcs3-0.0.14-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

Dependencies

Some dependencies that you will likely want to have installed for better rendering performance. You can install these after or before you build RPCS3 (the below packages assume you have an AMD gpu, NVIDIA users will need to install their vulkan packages). Having these dependencies installed will allow you to select the vulkan renderer which has better performance than the default opengl renderer.

Arch:

pacman -S vulkan-tools vulkan-radeon vulkan-amdvlk vulkan-icd-loader

Configuration

You will need the PS3 Firmware once you boot up RPCS3, which can be snagged from here

File->Install Firmware and point it to your downloaded firmware. Then you can Add Game with your copy of Demon’s Souls or whatever game your trying to get running on RPCS3.

However the configuration options I will be going over will be specific for Demon’s Souls.

Right click the game and select Create Custom Configuration.

CPU

CPU Options for best performance

GPU

GPU options

Note: Do not alter the Default Resolution, if you want to change the resolution use the Resolution Scale option.

Network

Network options required for online play.

If you want to play online with your friends, you will need to setup an RPCN account. And select the above options.

Follow the connection settings given at The Archstones as they have setup a RPCN server for people to play Demon’s Souls with, or you can self-host your own server using RPCN directly.

Demon’s Souls / RPCS3