By all accounts emulating the PlayStation 3’s bizarre ‘Cell’ architecture is an absolute nightmare. Fortunately the console’s popularity means there’s a dedicated crew at RPCS3 trying to get it running in some shape or form. Now though, after years and years of work, PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 can finally launch Demon’s Souls on PC - the missing link for PC Dark Souls fans.

Up until now the emulator was crashing within a minute of Demon’s Souls booting up, every time. However a breakthrough came when a user by the name of Numan suggested Demon’s Souls was trying to “allocate memory pages of different sizes, access levels, and different attributes.” When the game then tried to access these specific memory addresses it would fail, causing Demon’s Souls to crash.

With this knowledge in mind, RPCS3 set to working on a solution, Before they knew it, Demon’s Souls was booting and playable on PC. Throughout the course of this process they ran into numerous snags, but nothing that had halted them as much as the boot-up crash. After a number of tweaks and fixes it’s now playable, although there’s still a long way to go to achieve a stable frame rate in Demon’s Souls. Not that the PS3 version is any great barometer - the FPS frequently drops into the 10’s and often even single digits during intense scenarios.

“The game is very demanding of resources, and while Ryzen @ 4 ghz or 6 cores of Haswell-E can run some areas of the game at 30 fps, it can also drop down to as little as 10 fps in big open areas such as in front of The Boletarian Castle,” said the RPCS3 team.

Still a ways to go then but awesome news for the long-term preservation of a PlayStation 3 exclusive. If you want to do this now then you just need a disc copy of Demon’s Souls which you can rip, along with the latest version of the RPCS3 software. Be warned that you are entering shaky legal territory once you rip the ROM however.