Developer MysteryDash has released a patch for the official PS4 Remote Play PC client, allowing gamers to run the PS4 Remote Play functionality offline.

What is Offline PS4 Remote Play?

The PS4 Remote Play feature is pretty good, in particular since Sony made it available for PC gamers in addition to us Vita users. However, with the official Sony PC client for Remote play, you need to be connected to the internet in order for the app to launch. Officially, this is so that the client can check for critical updates to improve the user’s experience. In practice, it’s a best an annoyance for those of us who do not have internet access but still want to enjoy Remote Play. To quote the developer’s thoughts on this:

 Hello Sony,

If you ever happen to read this, don’t you think it would be nice to have this feature built-in ?

Think about it like this for a second : you are going on holiday with your PS4 and your laptop because you have no other display available for it. Most laptops aren’t shipped with an HDMI input port so you can’t directly connect your PS4 to your laptop’s screen. However, what you can do is connect your laptop and your PS4 with an ethernet cable and use RemotePlay… until you realize that you need an Internet connection to start the software.

The patch, simply named Offline PS4 Remote Play, lets you exactly do that, by removing the internet connection check directly in the official Sony executable.

Additionally, the developer gives you multiple options to actually enable offline PS4 Remote play, depending on your level of paranoia: a fully automated patcher, a manual way to apply the patch yourself via command line, explanations on how to create your own patch and where to apply it in the executable, or even a way that does not patch anything but simply reroutes some of the tool’s connection checks to Sony’s servers.

Playing PS4 Remote Play offline without patching the client (no programming required)

We reproduce the explanation for the proxy method below (source). Note: we haven’t confirmed if this works:

 Download and install Fiddler. Enable HTTPS decryption in Fiddler. With Fiddler running, start RemotePlay and wait for the request to https://remoteplay.dl.playstation.net/remoteplay/module/win/rp-version-win.json. Select the AutoResponder tab, enable the rules, enable unmatched requests passthrough. Drag & Drop the request made to remoteplay.dl.playstation.net into the rules list. Select the FiddlerScript tab and look for this line : static function OnBeforeRequest (oSession: Session) { Add the following content under the line you found earlier : if ( oSession.HTTPMethodIs ("CONNECT")) { oSession.oFlags[ " x-replywithtunnel " ] = " GenerateTunnel " ; return ; } Click on Save Script. That’s it for Fiddler. You have nothing to save by yourself. The only thing that matters now is that Fiddler must be up and running when you want to play without Internet. There’s still something to do. Currently, if you open RemotePlay, it’ll tell you that (if you are truly disconnected) there is not network connection available. To fix this, create an access point on your phone and connect to it (there’s no need to have an Internet connection available on your phone, otherwise it would defeat the point of having done everything mentionned above). Note that you can also use any free hotspot you may have around you. It’s already done ! When you’ll start RemotePlay, it’ll think that an Internet connection is available (when it’s merely connected to a hotspot WITHOUT Internet) and when it’ll try to look for updates Fiddler will take care of it. Enjoy the offline PS4 Remote Play.

Download Offline PS4 Remote Play Patch

If playing with Fiddler as described above sounds like too much hassle, you can download the patcher from the project’s github here.

It will be interesting to see how long this works, though. I have to assume that the PS4 remote play server software has ways to ask for an encrypted signature from the remote client, and refuse to connect to an old client. In parallel, they might be looking for ways to improve their connection checks in future versions of the clients.

Source: MysteryDash, via psx-place