Significant progress has been made on the PS4 scene over the past 3 days, from hackers managing to run PSP games on hacked PS4s. The trick is achieved by injecting PSP Games and homebrew into a PSP remastered game that appears to ship with a full fledged PSP emulator for the PS4.

GBATemp member KiiWii recently realized that the PS4 Remastered version of Parappa the Rapper was actually a PSP image of the game running within a PSP emulator. Fast forward a few days later, and multiple hackers are already able to boot several PSP games (including PSP homebrew) on their PS4, by “simply” replacing some of the resource files included in Parappa.

KiiWii has been posting regular progress over at GBATemp. Just a few hours ago, he showcased Loco Roco running through that trick. Other hackers have shown significant progress on that front as well, with Zecoxao showing the loading screen of Patapon for example.

Darkelement has touted that the psp emulator on PS4 (nicknamed PSPHD, apparently due to its feature that lets it replace the low-res PSP textures with hi-res PS4 ones on the fly) could be made available to the scene soon, sharing the configuration file being used for Parappa.

Last but not least, Z80 shared a screenshot of the basic 3D cube sample code from the homebrew PSPSDK. Pretty much the very first homebrew that any tinkerer trying to create games on their hacked PSP has ever run.

There are of course lots of open questions regarding what this injection mechanism will let us do. It’s unclear how many games will be fully compatible, as the devs have apparently not being able to go past the loading screens in some cases. KiiWii shared a list of “non working” games, which so far is bigger than the “working” ones.

Nevertheless, this wouldn’t be the first time that an internal emulator is “hijacked” this way on a Sony console to run older games. Recently, the PS2 emulator on the PS4 saw terrific progress being made in a similar fashion.

You’ll obviously need a hacked PS4 in order to try these things, once user-friendly methods are published.