Help:Frequently Asked Questions

This is a page meant to address common questions and issues faced by users.

Running VSH/XMB in RPCS3

We are happy to report that starting July 2021, VSH (VirtualShell, aka. XMB or XrossMediaBar) has been possible to get working on the official mainline builds of the emulator, bearing in mind some quirks and limitations.

Getting it to work

Assuming the global settings are in their default state, you'll only need to make sure of the following:

• you have firmware 4.46 (or older) installed
• you have the following options set to enabled in the global settings:
  • Write Color Buffers (Config > GPU > Write Color Buffers)
  • Force CPU blit emulation (Config > Debug > Force CPU blit emulation, see enabling the debug tab)

For a smoother experience, you may also want to apply the following:

• Config > CPU > PPU Decoder set to Interpreter (fast), until you're done with the initial setup
• Config > GPU > Default Resolution set to 1920x1080, for a FullHD presentation (if you prefer)

With all this set, all that's left is to boot it up! Select File > Boot VSH/XMB to get started.

Initial Setup

The initial setup consists of two phases. First, VSH will have to rebuild its XRegistry database from scratch. You may notice that the image output is low resolution, and has an old-school 4:3 aspect ratio - this is completely normal and expected behavior.

As soon as the progress bar hastily completes, you'll be met with an empty black screen. This is also expected behavior as of now. Simply quit VSH manually, like you'd quit any game, and then start it back up again (remember: File > Boot VSH/XMB). This puts us into the second phase of the setup process.

After a successful restart, the logo videos will show, and you'll be presented with the language select menu:

Select your desired language and press X.

Next, you'll be met with a message, saying that an HDMI display was detected. Currently, the HDMI related parts of the code are broken, so trying to use HDMI will hang VSH. Please select no, and press X.

Following this, you'll be asked to put in your timezone and the current time. You can just spam X to get through these, especially the current time selection part (it will autofill, if you hit X a couple times). Having set them, press Right. If you've done everything correctly (the summary page looks correct), hit X to finish the setup.

Before letting you in to the main menu, VSH will ask you if you want to set up a network connection. It is recommended that you don't.

And just a quick user profile confirmation later...

... welcome to the PS3!

Lastly, we'll look at fixing the resolution and the aspect ratio. Navigate to Settings > Display Settings > Video Output Settings on the XMB.

Here, you'll want to select Component / D-Terminal. As explained above, HDMI won't work yet, so selecting that would hang VSH.

Press Right, and then have the change accepted (will ask you twice). On the list, select 1080p (or 720p if you prefer), and have it accepted. Click on Finish to end the configuration.

This concludes the initial setup of the VSH / XMB. Use the Users > Turn Off System option to turn off VSH cleanly (will pester you on the next boot if you don't shut it down this way).

After selecting the option, the screen will turn black. You can then proceed to manually exit VSH by that point.

(Bonus: It is recommended to boot VSH up back again after this, to ensure everything worked correctly, and to collect some extra PPU module cache.)

(Note: Make sure to revert the PPU Decoder to Recompiler (LLVM) after you're done, in case you've set it to Interpreter (fast) for the duration of the setup process.)

Limitations

At its current stage, VSH has several quirks and limitations:

• there's no multi-process support yet, meaning you can't use XMB as a frontend to boot into games or other applications
• due to encryption related reasons, it will display several instances of Corrupted Data erroneously in place of Game Data)
• firmware newer than 4.46 are broken, for currently unknown reasons
• restarting and shutting down doesn't work automatically (hence why you have to do that manually as explained above)
• HDMI output doesn't work (hence why the fiddling with Component)
• there's no audio support yet (misses rsxaudio)

Troubleshooting

In case you somehow manage to brick it, you can try removing the dev_flash2 and dev_flash3 folders from the RPCS3 directory. This will put you back at square one (you'll need to do the initial setup all over again).

Enabling Debug tab

To enable RPCS3's debug tab in the settings window,

1. Navigate to:

   RPCS3\GuiConfigs on Windows

   ~/.config/rpcs3/GuiConfigs on Linux

2. Open CurrentSettings.ini with a text editor
3. Change showDebugTab=false to showDebugTab=true

Modifying settings through config.yml

In most cases, users should use the Settings tab available in the GUI to modify configurations present in RPCS3. However, the GUI interface does not expose all settings available. This is done to prevent users from accidentally modifying sensitive settings. In the event users need to modify one of these settings, the following guide will demonstrate how:

First, a custom configurations for the particular game must be created. This is done to ensure that changes made only affect one game and not every game present in the emulator:

1. Launch RPCS3
2. Right-click on the game and press Create Custom Configuration
3. When the Settings Menu opens, hit Save and close the emulator

This will create a custom configuration for this game

The next step is navigate to the location where the custom (per-game) configuration is saved:

1. Right click on the game in the gamelist and click on Open custom config folder (or)
   Navigate to RPCS3\config\custom_configs\ on Windows or ~/.config/rpcs3/custom_configs/ on Linux
2. Locate the file config_GAMEID.yml where GAMEID is the Title ID of your particular game
3. Open the file using any text editor
4. Scroll through the list of settings available to find the one you wish to modify (don't forget to hit save after you've changed the necessary option)