PS5 has ‘unified’ memory - the CPU and the GPU both read from the same location. Normal desktop PCs have separate memory for the CPU and GPU. That’s incredibly problematic for emulation - you have to keep track of the CPU preparing drawlists and be sure to transfer them to the GPU before issuing draw calls, and conversely, you may have to copy frame buffer data back to main memory if the CPU is used for calculating tone mapping. That’s incredibly slow if you do it naively, and likely to cause crashes and corruption if you don’t have the timing right.

The reason that RPCS3 and ShadPS4 run faster than a couple of frames per second is that they’ve put huge effort into optimising this, and you still have to disable tone mapping on eg. Demon’s Souls, as it brings a game you could otherwise run at 4K/120 to a standstill.

Yes, you wouldn’t have to translate the x64 bytecode into the platform-native equivalent, although dynamic recompilers are pretty good at that. Lots of high-end emulators will include something like Clang’s LLVM and call it a day. But you still have to emulate the platform, and that’s pretty painful.

Conversely, the reason why a lot of console conversions suck, even on powerful PCs, is because they were optimised around GPU memory updates being cheap. Something like the new Doom engine, that has separate paths and doesn’t make those assumptions, runs amazingly on all platforms.

Might be a controversial take, but Raspberry Pi’s are pure ass as media servers. They’re profoundly i/o limited, which extends to access to external USB devices as well as ethernet, and lack the oomph required to decode hi-res video streams locally. 1080p can be choppy, forget about 4K.

Pi5 occupies the unhappy spot where it’s too expensive for enthusiast and hobby applications, but inadequate as a desktop PC which benefit from a bit more power.

A mini-PC is a much better fit. An N100 might even be overkill - mine has a Skylake from a decade ago in it, and it crushes ‘media’ activities while gently sipping at electricity.

A shame. I liked Enslaved, loved DmC, and really liked Hellblade. They made quite a big thing at the time they were making Hellblade about wanting to be ‘double A’ publishers - making highly polished indie games on a sensible budget, basically. And then they sold out to Microsoft, which has screwed them over - all those publishers needing to make a non-stop stream of big budget megahits or they’ll be hung out to dry.

Consolations to all affected. It has been an absolute bloodbath in games development recently.