AstroQuest

ASTRO BOT Rescue Mission (PS4 / PlayStation VR) in virtual reality on Meta Quest 3, played from your own copy of the game through a PS4 emulator. Ways to play:

• On the headset alone: an app for the Quest 3 runs the emulator on the headset itself. No PC is needed once it is installed. Please note: while the standalone Meta Quest 3 build is fully functional and playable, the headset’s mobile GPU is pushed to its limits. As a result, native standalone visuals run at lower resolutions and visual fidelity compared to the original PS4 hardware or the PC VR mode.
• On a Windows PC, shown in the Quest through Virtual Desktop: the PC runs the game at the console's 60 frames a second and at up to six times its resolution.
• On a Windows PC with a Valve Index through SteamVR: the same PC build uses SteamVR's OpenXR runtime and a DualSense connected to the PC. Headset playback has been reported working; see the Index setup, including controller positional-tracking limits. Other PC headsets go the same way, through SteamVR or an OpenXR runtime of their own: a Bigscreen Beyond and a Pimax Dream Air have been reported working.

The emulator is shadPS4 (its ARM64 build, zenithblue-oss/shadps4-arm64, on the headset), to which this project adds what the game needs from a PlayStation VR: the headset, its tracking and reprojection, the camera's view of the controller (taken from the Quest's hand tracking), the 3D sound engine, the microphone, and fixes for the game's timing and resolution under emulation.

No game files are included or distributed. You need your own copy of ASTRO BOT Rescue Mission, dumped from your own PlayStation 4.

	PlayStation 4 + PS VR	Quest 3 on its own	PC + Virtual Desktop
Frames a second	60	30 in levels, 45 in lighter scenes	60 (more if you ask for it)
Picture per eye	960x1080 to 1440x1536	816x870 to 1440x1536	1440x1536 up to 3600x3840
Edges	multisampled	smoothed by a filter	multisampled

Status

Work in progress, built and tested by one person on one Quest 3 and one PC. World 1 & 2has been played through on the Quest 3 on its own; the PC path has been played over Virtual Desktop and fixed since. Expect rough edges, and please report what you find.

What you need

• A Meta Quest 3, or a Valve Index connected to a Windows PC running SteamVR. (The Quest 3S has the same chip and should work, but nobody has tried.)
• A PS5 DualSense controller. It stands in for the PS4 controller the game expects: buttons, sticks, touchpad, motion sensors, rumble and light bar. (A DualShock 4 may work too; untested.) On the PC the Quest's own Touch controllers can stand in for it.
• ASTRO BOT Rescue Mission, European release CUSA12392, version 1.00 or 1.04 (the game as on its disc, or with its last update), dumped from your own console and game: either as the game's folder (the one with eboot.bin, sce_sys, sce_module in it, about 13 GB) or as the .pkg package made from the dump, which the PC launcher unpacks by itself. (A package downloaded from the PlayStation Store is encrypted and cannot be used; a package that is only the game's update is not the game: unpacked into a folder named CUSA12392-UPDATE next to the game's CUSA12392, it is played over it.) Other regions and the versions in between are untested, and the fixes for the game's timing and resolution only apply to these two.
• To install on the headset: a computer with adb (or SideQuest) and the headset in developer mode (set in the Meta Horizon app on your phone; on Windows, adb may also need Meta's ADB driver, described on the same page).
• To play on the PC: Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit), a graphics card with Vulkan 1.3, 16 GB of memory or more (the emulator asks Windows for about 14 GB), the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable (x64) (the launcher says so if it is missing), and Virtual Desktop (the app on the Quest, the Streamer on the PC).

Installing: Quest 3 on its own

Download AstroQuest-<version>-Quest3.apk from the latest release, then:

1. Install the app. Connect the headset to the computer with a USB cable, allow USB debugging in the headset, and run

   adb install -r AstroQuest-0.13-Quest3.apk
   

   (or drag the APK onto SideQuest).

2. Copy the game to the headset, the folder named CUSA12392 (this takes a few minutes):

   adb push CUSA12392 /data/local/tmp/astro/games/
   

   The app also finds it in /sdcard/Android/data/com.astrobotquest.vrhost/files/games/CUSA12392, but that folder is deleted with the app if it is ever uninstalled.

   If your game is a .pkg file, unpack it on a PC first: the headset needs the game's folder. Two ways:

   • The easy one, on Windows: download AstroQuest-<version>-PC-VR-Windows.zip from the same release, unzip it, put your .pkg in its games folder and start Play Astro Bot VR.bat. It offers to unpack the package (about a minute, 13 GB); you can close it after that. games\CUSA12392 is then the folder to copy to the headset. You do not need Virtual Desktop or a VR-ready PC for this.
   • By hand, with the tool it uses: PkgTool (PkgTool-0.2.231.zip, free and open source; Windows, or the PkgTool.Core builds for Linux and macOS). PkgTool pkg_extract --passcode 00000000000000000000000000000000 game.pkg out puts the game in out/uroot: rename that folder CUSA12392. Then add the game's description, which the package keeps apart: PkgTool pkg_listentries game.pkg shows the number of PARAM_SFO, and PkgTool pkg_extractentry game.pkg <number> CUSA12392/sce_sys/param.sfo writes it. Without param.sfo the emulator does not recognise the game.

   Either way, only a package made from a dump of the game can be unpacked; one downloaded from the PlayStation Store is encrypted.

3. Pair the DualSense with the headset: Settings > Bluetooth > Pair, and on the controller hold Create and the PS button until the light bar flashes.

4. Start "Astro VR Host" from the App Library, under Unknown Sources. The first start takes a few seconds longer (it unpacks the emulator) and asks for the microphone: the game listens to it for blowing at things, as it did with PlayStation VR's.

Playing:

• Put the Touch controllers aside and hold the DualSense: the headset tracks your hands around it, and that is where the controller is in the game.
• The first screen asks to move the controller into a floating outline: hold it up in front of you where the outline is.
• On the world map, look at a planet and press ✕.
• Reset the view by holding OPTIONS for a second (or pressing the PS button) whenever you sit differently and things are too close, too far or off to one side.
• Taking the headset off pauses the game.
• Settings (refresh rate, resolution, field of view, sharpening, microphone gain...) go in /sdcard/Android/data/com.astrobotquest.vrhost/files/vrhost.txt; all of them are explained in README-QUEST-VR.md.

Your saves are kept in /sdcard/Android/data/com.astrobotquest.vrhost/files/data/shadPS4/home/1000/savedata. Updating the app with adb install -r keeps them; uninstalling deletes them, so copy that folder off the headset first (adb pull).

Installing: PC VR through Virtual Desktop

Download AstroQuest-<version>-PC-VR-Windows.zip from the latest release, then:

1. Unzip it into a folder with a short path, e.g. C:\Games\AstroQuest. Some of the game's files have long names, and the emulator cannot open a file whose full path is longer than Windows' 260 characters: keep the path of the folder that holds games under about 110 characters.
2. Put your copy of the game in its games folder, anywhere in it: the game's folder (the one with eboot.bin in it) or its .pkg file. A package is unpacked the first time you start, which takes a minute or so and about 13 GB. You can also leave the game where it is: when the launcher finds none, a window asks where it is and remembers the answer.
3. Set up Virtual Desktop: install the Streamer on the PC and, in its Options, choose VDXR as the OpenXR runtime. In the headset, in Virtual Desktop's Streaming settings, set the frame rate to 120 (the game then runs at 60 frames a second, as on the console).
4. Connect the DualSense to the PC, by USB cable or by Bluetooth paired with the PC, not with the headset: paired with the headset, it reaches the PC without motion sensors or touchpad. With no gamepad on the PC, the Touch controllers play instead.
5. Connect to the PC with Virtual Desktop, then start Play Astro Bot VR.bat on the desktop you see in the headset. The first time, it offers to unpack the game if it is a package (or asks where the game is). Then a small window lets you choose each eye's resolution, the frame rate and the field of view; Play starts the game, and the headset switches to it after a few seconds.

For the controller to be placed by your hands, turn on hand tracking in the headset and let Virtual Desktop forward tracking data to the PC. The Touch controller layout, all settings and what to do when something does not work are in README-PC-VR.md.

Building from source

Clone with the submodules:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/bigmak94/AstroQuest.git

Everything builds on Windows from Git Bash, without admin rights, with a portable toolchain kept in tools/ (not in the repository): LLVM/clang 21 (tools/llvm), CMake 4.4 (tools/cmake), Ninja (tools/ninja) and the MSVC CRT and Windows SDK fetched with xwin (tools/winsdk).

• PC build: source tools/env-win.sh && cmake --build build/win-x64 --target shadps4, then bash tools/make-pc-vr.sh puts it in pc-vr/.
• Quest app: bash tools/build-arm64.sh cross-compiles the emulator for the headset (Debian 13 arm64 sysroot made by tools/mk-sysroot.mjs, FEXCore built by the upstream shadps4-arm64-main/runtime/scripts/build-fexcore-smoke-aarch64.sh), then bash quest-host/build.sh builds the APK. That needs the Android SDK (build-tools 36.1, platform 36), an NDK, a JDK, the Khronos OpenXR loader for Android 1.1.63 (the .aar unzipped into tools/openxr), and the Bachata S4 v0.2.4 release APK (bachatas4-0.2.4-release.apk, SHA-256 4077b0d0b80e354c71eff1ce2c003f122449ac266eb27a6ac26744d3f9809a08) in the top folder, whose Linux runtime (glibc, its libraries and the Turnip Vulkan driver) the app carries.
• bash tools/make-release.sh <version> packs the release files into build/release/. It puts PkgTool 0.2.231, unzipped into tools/pkgtool, in the PC package: the launcher unpacks a game package with it.

How it all works, and the tools used to test it on the headset and with a simulated one, is described in README-QUEST-VR.md and README-PC-VR.md.

Support the project

If AstroQuest gave you a good time in VR and you want to help it go further, you can support its development here:

https://buy.stripe.com/6oU4gB5450PZ18h8aK1wY00

License

AstroQuest is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or (at your option) any later version (GPL-2.0-or-later), the license of shadPS4 it is built on.

The third-party components it uses or ships keep their own licenses: among them FEX (MIT), Mesa's Turnip Vulkan driver (MIT), the GNU C Library (LGPL-2.1-or-later), PkgTool (LGPL-3.0), the Khronos OpenXR SDK (Apache-2.0) and the libraries under shadps4-arm64-main/externals. See THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md for what the release files contain and where the source of each part is.

ASTRO BOT, PlayStation and PlayStation VR are trademarks of Sony Interactive Entertainment. This project is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by Sony Interactive Entertainment, Team Asobi or Meta. It contains no game, firmware, keys or other copyrighted console files: use it only with software you own and have dumped yourself.

Thanks

• The shadPS4 team and contributors. None of this would exist without their PlayStation 4 emulator: everything here is built on top of their years of work. Thank you!
• zenithblue-oss/shadps4-arm64 and Bachata S4, for the ARM64 build of shadPS4, its FEX integration and the Linux runtime it runs in on Android.
• FEX-Emu, which runs the game's x86-64 code on the headset's ARM processor.
• Mesa and its Turnip driver for Adreno GPUs (the build used here comes from Vauzi-17/mesa-tu8).
• LibOrbisPkg, whose PkgTool unpacks game packages for the PC launcher.
• Everyone who reported what went wrong, and those who sent the fix along: ODevStudio for SteamVR and Valve Index support and the desktop's spectator views, Clodo76 for finding the game's 1.04 executable from inside, evertec82 for what stopped the game under SteamVR.
• The Khronos Group for OpenXR and Vulkan, vgmstream for documenting Sony's audio formats, and Virtual Desktop for the PC streaming path.