ShadPS4’s ShadNet Lets PS4 Emulator Players Go Online Without PSN

The shadPS4 team has announced ShadNet, a new open-source custom server that lets PS4 emulator users play online without connecting to Sony’s PlayStation Network. The team framed it as a way to “connect, and play online games together,” built directly into the emulator that brought Bloodborne to PC with unlocked frame rates. Registration is open now, and the team says the project has been in development for a few months.

At launch, ShadNet can do one thing: score tracking. Users register accounts through a form on the shadPS4 website, then sign in once the Qt launcher adds account input. The system is modeled on RPCN, the open-source custom server that lets the PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 play games online without a Sony login. So for shadPS4, this is day one of a familiar roadmap.

What ShadNet Does Today (And What It Doesn’t Yet)

The shadPS4 team announced the project in a blog post titled “Great progress with shadNet,” signed by a contributor called Matthew. “ShadNet is going to offer shadPS4 users a way to connect, and play online games together,” the team wrote in the official ShadNet announcement post. The post describes ShadNet as having “been in the works for a few months now.”

Today’s ShadNet is a working server, not a finished feature set. Account registration is live through a form on the project site, and the custom server code lives at the ShadNet source repository on the team’s GitHub organisation. Users still cannot type their credentials into shadQtLauncher, the team’s official front-end; that wiring is “coming soon (but we’re not sure when),” per the blog post. A wiki page is also open for community-contributed game configuration tips.

What ShadNet cannot do yet is most of what online play means. No friend lists, no invites, no matchmaking, no party chat. Right now the only working function is keeping score across sessions.

ShadNet is still in development, and there is still a lot to be done, but it’s ready for testing. At this moment, only score tracking works, but please feel free to give it a try!

Built on the Same Playbook as PS3’s RPCN

RPCN was built by GalCiv, an RPCS3 lead developer, as an open-source server that emulates the peer-to-peer matchmaking the PlayStation 3 used to handle. It sits behind RPCS3 the same way ShadNet now sits behind shadPS4, and the shadPS4 team explicitly built ShadNet on that implementation. The team wrote that ShadNet “is based on the implementation of RPCN for PS3,” with a link to the original RPCN repository in the blog post. RPCN’s design is documented at RPCN’s netplay documentation on the RPCS3 wiki.

RPCN has been gaining features for years. Version 1.4 of the server, released in early 2025, added private room slots and passwords, IPv6 signaling, group support, and command-line account resets. The newer RPCN updates let dozens of PS3 titles play online, including Persona 4 Arena, Persona 4 Arena Ultimax, the BlazBlue series from Calamity Trigger through Central Fiction, and Super Hang-On.

That catalogue is the implicit target for ShadNet, even though the PS4 emulator is starting further back. Where RPCN has spent years solving matchmaking, friends lists, and invites, ShadNet currently records scores. The good news for the shadPS4 team is that the RPCN code is open source, the design has been hardened against thousands of players, and the PS3 and PS4 networking stacks overlap more than they differ. The starting line is well behind, but the destination is mapped.

Side by side, the two projects look like the same plan at different points in time. That makes the gap, and the path across it, easier to read.

ShadPS4 v0.16.0 Laid the Networking Groundwork

The networking stack that ShadNet talks to had to exist before ShadNet could be useful, and that is what shadPS4 v0.16.0 delivered. The release landed on June 1, 2026, and the team’s release notes call it “our largest update to date.” The release came with hundreds of changes from dozens of contributors, and included the first large implementation stages of the PS4 HTTP subsystem, per the full v0.16.0 release notes.

Without that HTTP work, no PS4 game that talks to a server would be able to talk to ShadNet either. The same release also added a new configuration system with save and trophy migration, the first OpenAL-based audio backend, and the beginnings of camera emulation.

Other v0.16.0 pieces read like supporting infrastructure for online play too. Local multiplayer now works through a new shared input system, which is the same plumbing a server-mediated session needs. Vulkan stability was tightened across the board, shader recompilation was rewritten with more Neo GPU instructions for PS4 Pro titles, and the project gained its first x64 FreeBSD build. The release is the foundation under ShadNet, even though ShadNet was not in the release notes themselves.

• New configuration system with save and trophy migration support
• Initial OpenAL audio backend
• Camera emulation support begins
• Local multiplayer infrastructure
• Big Picture Mode with controller-first interface
• Screenshot functionality with overlay support
• HTTP subsystem first implementation stages
• Improved Vulkan stability and memory synchronization
• Expanded Neo GPU instruction coverage for PS4 Pro titles
• Initial x64 FreeBSD platform support

How Far PS4 Emulation Has Actually Come

shadPS4 was started by George Moralis in October 2022, the same developer who previously built the PCSX2 PlayStation 2 emulator. The first public version, 0.1.0, shipped in July 2024 and could launch Sonic Mania and a handful of other 3D titles. Version 0.16.0 in June 2026 is the tenth major release on a roughly two-month cadence.

The compatibility list now runs into the hundreds. As of November 2025, the shadPS4 compatibility list counted 317 titles as “in game” and 179 titles as “playable.” Digital Foundry tested the emulator in January 2026 and reported frame rates up to 60 FPS at 4K resolution on an Nvidia RTX 4080, with glitches appearing above 60 FPS. The headline use case, Bloodborne, has gone from a 5 FPS red-screened proof of concept to a playable PC port in less than two years.

• v0.16.0 released June 1, 2026 (Wikipedia)
• 317 titles listed “in game” on the shadPS4 compatibility list, as of November 2025 (Wikipedia)
• 179 titles listed “playable” on the shadPS4 compatibility list, as of November 2025 (Wikipedia)
• Up to 60 FPS at 4K in Digital Foundry’s January 2026 test on an Nvidia RTX 4080 (Wikipedia)

Sony’s Two-Year Silence Meets a New Question

Sony has not taken legal action against shadPS4 in the project’s roughly two years of public releases. The development team does not distribute PlayStation 4 firmware files or game PKG files, which keeps the project on the side of the long line of US case law that finds emulators themselves legal. ShadNet puts a new kind of pressure on that status quo.

Emulating an online service is not the same as emulating a single-player game. The legal history of PlayStation emulation is mixed: Sony sued and lost against the commercial PlayStation 1 emulators Bleem! and Virtual Game Station in the late 1990s and early 2000s. More recently, Sony has gone after derivative projects built on its IP rather than emulators themselves; Bloodborne Kart was forced to rebrand to Nightmare Kart after Sony contacted its creator. A custom server that lets PS4 emulator users compete online is the closest the project has come to standing in for Sony’s network.

The new ShadNet system lands while Sony is also defending itself on multiple legal fronts in the digital-store space, including the £2 billion PlayStation Store class action now closing arguments in the UK. The emulator team and the console business are not in court together, but the broader legal posture matters. A company that fights every front at once is a company that picks which fronts to fight.

Sony’s own preservation team has been speaking up too, per Sony’s preservation team’s backwards compatibility roadmap. ShadNet does not directly compete with that work today; a score-tracking server for an emulator is a small thing. The question is what it becomes when matchmaking, friends, and party chat arrive.

What the Team Has Left to Wire Up

The gap between today’s ShadNet and a usable online console is wider than a few lines of code. Matchmaking requires the kind of room-and-slot system RPCN v1.4 only added recently. Friend lists need a presence service that does not yet exist for shadPS4. Party invites need the same plumbing. The team said in the blog post signoff that they “will share more information with you in the future, so stay tuned.”

RPCN is the destination in concrete terms. Its working feature list, friend management, room passwords, private invites, group signaling, is the roadmap the shadPS4 team has effectively inherited. Today’s ShadNet matches what RPCN looked like in its earliest days: a server that records outcomes, and a client that logs in.

Both projects are open source under the same organisation, so the next layers can be audited, copied, or contributed to by anyone. The PS4 emulator community has a working blueprint. The work between now and a full RPCN-equivalent is now visible.