shadPS4 0.21: platinum trophy, DLC and Apple Macs

shadPS4 0.21 lands sixteen days after 0.20: the PS4 emulator for PC finally unlocks the platinum trophy, loads DLC better and takes care of Apple Macs.


Sixteen days after 0.20

On 30 October 2026, the shadPS4 team (GPL-2.0 licence) released version 0.21.0, codenamed “Until Mavethee Dawn”. It comes sixteen days after 0.20, the release that opened up Bloodborne's online play. It is available for Windows, Linux and macOS.


What changes

• Trophies: the platinum trophy never unlocked. That is fixed.
• Call of Duty: Black Ops II and III hung because no microphone was found: the emulator now simulates an unplugged microphone.
• Additional content: DLC linked to the game is loaded, with its entitlement keys, and PSN authentication (np_auth) has been rewritten.
• Apple silicon Macs: several workarounds for Rosetta 2, the layer that translates x86 code, which crashed or got some instructions wrong.
• Console services: a virtual USB drive and the PS4's music player are now emulated, and PS4 Pro mode is handled better.
• Graphics: the second part of the automatic cleanup of graphics memory, and around thirty fixes to the video core and the shader recompiler.

A new option, fast_shader_math, relaxes the floating-point rules of shaders.


How to get it

As always, you need your own games and firmware, dumped from your PS4. To install and set up the emulator, follow our shadPS4 tutorial. The release notes do not put a figure on the compatibility gain: it varies from game to game.


Sources: shadPS4 0.21.0 (GitHub) · shadPS4 (GitHub)