RPCS3 Background Updater

This is a Python script created for automatically updating RPCS3 in the background, silently. It works by you manually adding it once to the Task Scheduler (on Windows), which will then periodically run it as per your configuration, and keep the emulator up-to-date for you without any interruption.

I believe this to be superior to the currently inbuilt updating methods, as it's operational even when RPCS3 is not running, and does away with all the waiting and bother of updating on startup (which often takes a lot of time for various reasons).

RPCS3 could also inject a task roughly like this automatically, but it's pretty annoying to do that, and kind of ugly. It's also ever so slightly more secure this way.

Requirements

This script depends on both 7-Zip and Python being installed, along with the requests Python library.

For installing 7-Zip on your system, see here.

For installing Python on your system, see here.

For installing the requests Python library, open the command line, and issue:

pip install requests

Usage

On Windows systems

Click here to expand...

1. Download the script from GitHub by

   • visiting the script file (updater.py) in the repository,
   • clicking on the Raw button to display the original file,
   • pressing CTRL+S to save it to your RPCS3 installation directory (where rpcs3.exe is)

2. Open the Start Menu, then search for and open Task Scheduler

3. Click on Create Task...

4. Configure the updater task as follows:

   • for Name, give it something descriptive, like RPCS3 Background Updater
   • on the Triggers tab, add a new trigger:
     • for Begin the task, select On Schedule
     • for frequency, select One time (confusing, I know)
     • check the Repeat task every: checkbox, and set it to your liking (I use 15 mins)
     • at the for a duration of: drop-down, select Indefinitely
     • click OK to save it
   • on the Actions tab, add a new action:
     • for Action: you'll want Start a program
     • for Program/script: you'll want to simply type in pythonw
     • for Add arguments:, you'll need to provide the path to the script file
       • navigate to your RPCS3 installation directory where you've downloaded it
       • hold CTRL and right click
       • select Copy full path
       • paste it into the Add arguments: textbox (and don't remove the quotes around it)
     • click OK to save it
   • on the Conditions tab, check the only if network connection is available (optional)
   • click OK to finalize the task

5. Open RPCS3, and in Config > GUI change the Check for updates on startup setting to Background

If you've done everything correctly, you'll no longer be prompted to update RPCS3 on startup, nor will it forcefully update on every launch. Instead, the emulator will be kept up-to-date by this script, periodically polling for updates, and applying them as they come, seamlessly.

On Unix systems

The script won't work on Unix-like systems right now. Wouldn't take much to fix it, but I have no desire to. This way of manhandling the lifecycle management is a very Windows problem, so I can't imagine there to be much interest to replicate it for AppImages.

Notes and limitations

This script will only work as long as the specific version (v2) of their update API endpoint does, but that seems to be stable, so should be fine for quite some time.