Beta program on PS4 took away the remote play feature. Although not to dependent on that feature since playing PS4 games in PS Vita is not that the right way, I use it to do some casual gaming like taking down couple of radio towers in FarCry or couple of arcade style racing. This all changed when Sony released it 3.50 beta 3 upgrade and opened up remote play and added PC and Mac to its list of supported devices. It was a much anticipated update. I immediately fired up my laptop and went to the official site and downloaded the client but the installer had gave me a pop up saying Windows 7 is not supported… Seriously..!!! Compatibility is Windows 8.1 up.
Remote play client download <a href=”https://remoteplay.dl.playstation.net/remoteplay/lang/en/index.html”>link</a>
Change of plans… I have another laptop which has Windows 10 in it. The only problem is that it is close to 7 years and I do not even know whether it can boot up. The only upside was that it is an Alienware M17x and it is a fighter with a wonderful FullHD ultra sharp IPS panel display which is a treat to watch movies and play games.
Booted up my tank and I was greeted with the login screen… Sigh…! it boots… I quickly went to the remote play site downloaded the client and it installed without any fuss.. Launched the app and the app asked me to connect the PS4 dual shock.
Everything went fine and remote play kicked in and I was greeted with a Black screen. I was able to hear the sound and I was sure that the controller inputs were even fed back to PS4 but it just the display that was not working.
I didn’t care about my video card drivers for this case because I thought remote play would just stream the game play to PC and Microsoft Display Adapter driver was sufficient enough since videos were playing fine. I was 100% that it was the video card driver issue. Fix would be to install the video drivers right?? Yes, but there is a catch Windows 10 doesn’t support my OEM display driver that was released way back in 2010. No surprise there. If I install the OEM provided driver Windows 10 doesn’t boot…
Now the only solution is modding the latest NVIDIA driver.
Disclaimer: Modifying manufacturer driver files could potentially cause harm to your electronics and would certainly void your warranty. So caution advised. If you are following the below steps do it at your own risk..
- Download the latest driver from NVIDIA site. For my dual 260M GTX, I downloaded version 341.95. Windows 10 64bit version (<a href=”http://www.nvidia.in/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-in”>Click Here</a>).
- Hit Windows + X and then M to open Device Manager.
- Right click on each unique display adapters. Mine has 9400M and GTX 260M and click properties.
- Go to details tab and Hardware IDs as property.
- Make a note of the first row especially the below highlighted part.
- Right click the downloaded installer and extract using winrar or 7-zip.
- Go to the extracted folder and navigate to Display.Driver folder.
- Now the configuration file changes for each OEM but for Dell it is file with the name nvdmi
- Open the above file using you favourite text editor.
- Find you display card using Ctrl+F. For me it is 260M and 9400. These configuration will be at the bottom of the file
- Replace the middle part for the cards with the above noted IDs. For me I had to replace 02A2 with 02A1.
- Save the file.
- Open Admin command prompt using Win + X then A
- Type bcdedit /set {current} testsigning yes
- Restart your system
- Launch the installer from the extracted folder. Check perform clean installation option!!
- After successful installation, execute bcdedit /set {current} testsigning no.
- Restart the system
Launch the Remote play application now and voilà it works. Suddenly am playing FarCry 4 on my 7 year old system in its gorgeous display.
Now why do I ever wanna stream gaming to PC whereas I can play that using flat screen?.. Well maybe its the PC gaming Gene where I can think the PS4 as a wireless graphics amplifier (analogy to Alienware Graphics Amplifier) and do some casual private gaming on PC.
–KB
