RPCS3 Now Lets You Play PS3 Games Straight From The Original Discs

The team behind RPCS3, the open-source PlayStation 3 emulator available on Windows, macOS and Linux, has added a feature many players have been asking for: the ability to boot a game directly from its original Blu-ray disc, without first dumping the full game to a hard drive. The feature was developed by contributors digant73 and Megamouse.

True plug-and-play support

In practice, players can now simply insert a PS3 disc into a compatible Blu-ray drive connected to their PC and launch the game straight from RPCS3, with no prior dump and no reliance on any server. "Plug-and-Play! Owning your games as physical media allows you to play games released as far back as 20 years ago without relying on any servers," the team summed up on its official account. Package install times from disc have also been optimized across every supported platform.

There is one technical catch: PS3 discs use a format that many PC drives simply cannot read properly. RPCS3 therefore maintains a list of compatible drive models from LG, Asus, Samsung, Lite-On, Sony and BenQ on its official compatibility page. Out of roughly 3,500 games tested by the team, 77% are now playable without critical glitches. The timing matters: as Sony leans further into an all-digital future, this move makes it much easier to keep a huge back catalogue of physical PS3 games playable for years to come.

Source: Time Extension