PsPcSdk Emulator

This utility allows you to bypass the PlayStation Network account login requirement for various Sony-published games on PC.

Now that Sony has made Playstation Network accounts optional on PC, you can use this utility to obtain the benefits of a PSN account without creating one.

NOTE: This does not work for the online components of those games. Do not use it for that purpose.

Tested Games

The utility has been tested on the Steam versions of the following games:

• God of War: Ragnarök
• Horizon Zero Dawn: Remastered
• Until Dawn
• LEGO Horizon Adventures
• Marvel's Spider-Man 2

All these games work out of the box with PsPcSdk Emulator.

How to Use

Follow the instructions for your platform to install PsPcSdk Emulator.

Windows

1. Go to the releases page.
2. Download the version.dll file from the latest version.
3. Place the file in the same folder as the executable of the game. See below on how to find the game executable.
4. Run the game. You will no longer see the PlayStation Login prompt.

Linux

1. Go to the releases page.
2. Download the version.dll file from the latest version.
3. Place the file in the same folder as the executable of the game. See below on how to find the game executable.
4. Right-click the game on Steam and select Properties.
5. In the Launch Options box, enter: WINEDLLOVERRIDES="version=n,b" %command%
6. Run the game. You will no longer see the PlayStation Login prompt.

How to Find the Game Executable

1. Right-click the game on Steam and select Properties.
2. Click on the LOCAL FILES tab.
3. Click Browse Local Files...
4. You will find a file with the game icon and the .exe extension. That is the executable file.

IMPORTANT note on Unreal Engine games (Until Dawn and LEGO Horizon Adventures): Unreal Engine games store the real game executable in a different location. You can identify Unreal Engine games because they usually have an Engine folder, another folder with the name of the project (Glow for LEGO Horizon Adventures and Bates for Until Dawn), and an executable file. In Unreal Engine games, the real executable is located under the folder with the project name, then Binaries, and then Win64. Place version.dll there.

Custom DLL loader (advanced users)

PsPcSdk Emulator supports being loaded by an external DLL loader. Just rename version.dll to something else an point the DLL loader to it.

This can be useful when loading multiple mods that use the same DLL name (version.dll in this case).

How it works

All the source code is located under PsPcSdkEmulator/src/ and the project is dividen in several parts.

Loader

Located in the loader folder, this part of PsPcSdk Emulator is responsable for making the game load this implementation of the Playstation SDK insteed of the one provided by Sony. To achive that, Microsoft Detours is used to hook some Win32 functions.

SDK

The sdk folder provides stubs and some implementations of the Playstation SDK functions. Once the loader makes the game load PsPcSdk Emulator as if it was the Playstation SDK, the game links against this implementations insteed of the original ones.

Net (pss-cloud.net / PSNAccountLinking library)

Playstation games on PC are built with a Playstation account linking library (PSNAccountLinking) which is responsable for linking Steam and PSN accounts. PSNAccountLinking relies on pss-cloud.net for account linking. Inside the net folder there is a local HTTP server that is started when the game calls the scePsPcInitializeInternal() SDK function. That HTTP server emulates pss-cloud.net telling the game that a PSN account is already linked to the Steam account and accepting any new link requqests. Additionaly, WinHttp functions are hooked so that requests to pss-cloud.net are redirected to the local HTTP server.

Building

1. Clone this repository.
2. Open the solution in Visual Studio (built on 2022).
3. Build the project. It will automatically sign the built DLL with a fake certificate.
4. The DLL can be found on x64/{Debug/Release}/PsPcSdkEmulator.dll rename it to version.dll to use it.

Recreating the Fake Certificate

A fake certificate is required for PsPcSdk Emulator to load in place of the official PlayStation SDK. You can regenerate it by running the RunMakeCert.bat script inside the project folder. The new certificate will be saved to /src/loader/cert.pfx and will automatically be used to sign when building.

Contributing

Just submit a PR. There are some things to improove:

• Write actual implementations of the currently stubbed functions.
• Verify that the HTTP responses for Until Dawn are correct, since the game uses different endpoints.
• Improve the structure and add features to the current code (custom Online id for the PSN account, track trophie completion...)

License

This project is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. You are free to use, modify, and distribute this project, as long as you comply with the terms of MPL-2.0. See the LICENSE file for details.

Third-Party Dependencies

This project uses Microsoft Detours, which is licensed under the MIT License.
You can see the license here.

Libraries Used

PsPcSdk Emulator uses Microsoft Detours for hooking Windows functions.

Credits

To the author of the nopcpssdk mod for God of War: Ragnarök. I took some ideas from that mod about the DLL loading process. Also, nopcpssdk was the reason I made this project, as it showed that it could be done. I'm not naming him here since he deleted the mod.

Nixxes for leaving some logging enabled on Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered. It helped.