Gaming has been Samarveer’s greatest passion, and the Literature graduate in him takes immense joy in dissecting games for their themes, messages, and impact. Samarveer holds a deep appreciation of gaming, and considers the platform to be the most immersive and impactful across all media. He can be found engaging with gaming communities online, always ready to debate the finer points of ray tracing or itching to write an 8-page collegiate thesis on any game that impacts him emotionally.
It's funny how two of PlayStation's greatest experiences ever have also been its most poorly served. FromSoftware's Bloodborne came to the PS5, but it never got a remaster, remake, or even a 60FPS patch. Meanwhile, P.T., Hideo Kojima's legendary playable teaser for the canceled Silent Hills, was de-listed forever from the PlayStation Store in 2015, just eight months after release.
Both of these games deserve better than being shackled to the hardware they debuted on. Now, however, vibe-coding is helping hundreds of players create native PC projects through decompilation and recompilation, and they're taking console relics and throwing modern rendering technology at them.
Getting both of these games to run on my PC through my own files was a feat in and of itself, but I was far more interested in the new "magical" kid on the block — DLSS 5.
2014 console exclusives and DLSS 5 work like a charm, apparently
The secret sauce is OptiScaler, of course
Getting P.T. running natively on my PC was one thing, but injecting DLSS 5 neural rendering into a game that predates the technology by twelve years was an entirely different challenge. For P.T., I was fairly interested in seeing what happens when I introduced DLSS 5 to a game that never anticipated anything like it. For Bloodborne, I could have done this using the ShadPS4 emulator at any time during the last month, much like I did with my other PlayStation 3 games.
Bloodborne on PC uses a dedicated translation layer that lets its original PS4 executable run on a Windows or Linux PC's x86-64 processor. So, it's not completely a native project, but it's faster, smoother, and much more direct than traditional PS4 emulation software, all without being a complete source-level port. This "native" port for the game has support for DLSS with uncapped framerates, which gave me a lot more performance to work with before paying the usual neural rendering tax, which more than halves the performance of a game with each neural rendering layer you throw at it.
Thankfully, OptiScaler has evolved into a rather ingenious workaround — it let me inject Nvidia's neural rendering capabilities into games that were never designed to support them. Problem is, DLSS 5 just isn't conventional upscaling. The neural rendering model uses scene information to transform a game's appearance, and alters how details, materials, and lighting are perceived. Outside of official supported titles, using DLSS 5 requires plenty of additional plumbing and elbow grease, and that's where community-built OptiScaler with neural rendering support comes in.
P.T. looked great with DLSS 5, but I couldn't quite see the point
The FOX Engine game remains magical over a decade later
P.T. on PC is a full native PC port, with its game logic rebuilt entirely in C++ and a Vulkan renderer loading the original assets from your own PS4 files. This does, however, require that you somehow own a PlayStation 4 device with the game files installed for P.T., which, luckily, I had from all the way back in 2014.
The PC port, with its ray traced lighting and shadows, already looked miles better than the original game on my PlayStation 4, but with two neural rendering passes added to the frame, P.T. looked better than ever before. Since this native PC port of P.T. supports DLSS Super Resolution as well as DLSS Frame Generation, running OptiScaler along with Neural Rendering DLL files was a piece of cake.
The textures looked like they could've been made yesterday, but truth be told, the FOX Engine was doing so much of the work here that even the original PS4's graphical settings looked fantastic at 1440p with DLSS Quality.
Regardless, the game definitely got a new coat of paint, and dare I say, it became scarier. With more realistic floors, walls, and objects than ever before, it got all the more terrifying when these same assets became hostile towards me the more I explored the same two corridors of the Playable Teaser. Yet for all the visual polish DLSS 5 added, I couldn't quite shake the feeling that P.T. was already doing most things right.
DLSS 5 was a resounding triumph for Bloodborne
Yharnam has never looked this good
DLSS 5 was definitely a success with P.T., but it was with Bloodborne that it truly shined. Yharnam was completely revamped, with every single building in the Gothic-Victorian city looking drop-dead gorgeous. DLSS 5's neural rendering completely refreshed the graphics while keeping the visuals as close to the original aesthetic as possible. This was perhaps the clearest example of preserving the original artistic vision while still truly blowing you away with the neural rendering's take on the cobbled streets, enemy characters, player outfits, and the entire surrounding environment.
The difference was magnificent, and clearly, DLSS 5 had plenty of visual information to work with. The city retained its grimy, decaying aesthetic, which, for over a decade, has defined its identity. However, its materials and finer details took on a whole new character under neural rendering. Bloodborne felt like a much more compelling demonstration of what Nvidia's neural rendering could bring to an older game.
Bloodborne gave me plenty of trouble, though. The native PC launcher seemed a little too adamant to not let me run OptiScaler. Thankfully, ReShade, along with one of its most popular community add-ons, Deep Fried Chicken, helped me run neural processing passes on BloodBorne. There were certainly some hoops to jump through, but boy was it worth the reward when I finally managed to get things running.
The best days of game preservation may still lie ahead
Decompilation and recompilation are becoming two of gaming's most exciting preservation tools, letting enthusiasts bring beloved console games to PC without waiting for Sony to remember its exclusives exist. Vibe-coding with tools like Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex is accelerating development at what seems like light speed, which is why we're seeing increasingly ambitious projects emerge.
Preserving a game used to mean keeping an old console running, or hoping that its digital storefront stayed online. Now, that's changing faster than ever. The decompilation and recompilation community is getting stronger by the day, with increasingly ambitious projects that we once thought were inseparable from their original hardware.
That's what excites me the most about this whole movement. Every successful project makes the next seemingly impossible undertaking a little less daunting, opening doors for games that might otherwise disappear into obscurity. If this is where we're at today, I can't wait to see what's next.
