Console modder and YouTuber Jon Bringus figured out how to play Valve's early development hero shooter Deadlock on PS4. Achieving this goal was both painful and completely impractical.
Bringus demonstrates why in a new video. First, there's the matter of outfitting a console from 2013 for an invite-only beta game exclusive to Steam. To do this, Bringus starts by ripping open his yellowing PS4 to swap out its spinning disk for a 512 GB Micron SATA SSD hard drive. Then, he puts Linux on the PS4's internal hard drive, runs the PPPwn jailbreak server on a Raspberry Pi 4 model B computer, and establishes an internet connection.
That all takes a lot of patient fiddling. But there's still more time to waste. After spending hours trying to install Deadlock to his zombified PS4, Bringus sits through several 20-minute long Linux reboots and crashes until — finally! — he makes it to the Deadlock menu.
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The menu is in 360p. He has to render it down to 144p before he starts playing.
"It's barely hanging on, but we're here," he says, sounding like there are tears in his eyes. "I'm scared to even move the mouse."
When the tender moment passes, Bringus has to confront a hard reality: broken Deadlock's Game Boy Color graphics are showing up between zero and nine FPS. It's better than zero FPS, but Bringus ultimately decides that "in no world is this playable." He leaves his public match early after choosing to spare his teammates. Then he tries installing Deadlock on the 2016 PS4 Pro, too, for a supposed hardware improvement, but he breaks his game by trying it out in 540p. You should stick to Steam for now.
