Original Xbox, PS2 and 3DS Emulators Run on a Jailbroken PS5, but PS3 Still Won't Boot

Apparently, my PlayStation 5 can now play original Xbox games, which is a sentence I never thought I would say. Alongside that, I got PlayStation 2 emulation, Nintendo 3DS emulation and, somehow, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild running on the console.

There's a catch, though. While some of these emulators worked surprisingly well, others were an absolute nightmare, and one of them had me spending hours setting up Linux on my PC just to get a completely black screen on the PlayStation. So I tested six different emulators to find out how far PS5 emulation has actually come: which ones work, which ones don't, and whether any of this is actually worth installing.

A regular jailbroken PS5, not a PS5 Pro or a gaming PC

This is my regular jailbroken PS5. It's not a PS5 Pro, and it's not a gaming PC pretending to be a PS5. It's just the actual console. I'm using a jailbreak along with a few tools that let me launch homebrew applications.

There has been a ridiculous amount of progress in the PS5 homebrew scene recently. We've gone from fairly basic homebrew to people demonstrating games from completely different consoles running on PlayStation hardware. Those demonstrations look incredible, but I wanted to know what happens when you actually try setting this stuff up yourself. As I quickly found out, getting an emulator to open and getting a game to run properly are two very different things.

RetroArch works on PS5 once a jailbreak tool conflict is sorted

I started with the easiest one, RetroArch. Basically, it's one application that can run a whole bunch of different classic systems through something called cores, and on a PS5, that's pretty awesome. I had Final Fantasy VI running on a Game Boy Advance core inside my PlayStation 5, and it looked really good. I was playing different sorts of games directly on the console.

Getting to that point was a little more annoying than I expected. At the very first, I installed the emulator, copied over the cores, tried selecting one, and nothing. It just kept saying no core, which was confusing because the files were literally there.

After a bunch of troubleshooting, I discovered that my jailbreak setup was part of the problem. One of the tools I was using could pause a system component after launching an application, and that appeared to interfere with RetroArch loading its cores. After changing the configuration and sorting out the installation, I got everything working. I haven't tested every single core yet, but RetroArch itself is working. One down, five to go.

The PS2 emulator based on PCSX2 is one of the most promising

Next up was something I was much more excited to try: PlayStation 2 games on the PlayStation 5. Obviously, Sony has its own ways of bringing classic games to modern consoles, but this is different. This is a homebrew PS2 emulator port based on PCSX2, and the idea of being able to load my own PS2 games through an emulator on the PS5 is honestly really cool.

I installed the emulator, set up the required files, added my games and tried launching it. For a while, I got absolutely nothing, just a black screen. The emulator also uses helper files and payloads, so there's more involved than just copying a game onto a USB drive. But after getting the setup right, it launched, with PS2 games running directly on my PlayStation 5.

One of the games I ran is actually a heavy game to emulate, even though it's PlayStation 2. I know it's about three generations before the PlayStation 5, but it's still impressive for me to see it that fluid, and the pixels look "so insanely sharp." I still want to test more games and see how compatibility holds up, but unlike some of the emulators coming later, we actually got into gameplay, and that makes this one of the most promising things I've tested so far. That's two working emulators.

Nintendo 3DS games handle the two screen problem with custom layouts

The next one is probably even stranger: a Nintendo 3DS game running on a PlayStation 5. The emulator is included in a wider PS5 emulation project, and from its options menu I was running at six times graphics.

One of the things I was curious about was how the two screen setup would actually work on a television, because obviously a 3DS has two displays and the PS5 doesn't magically come with a touch screen. Fortunately, the emulator lets you change the screen layout. You can make the main screen bigger, display both screens together, or switch things around depending on the game.

It's not exactly the same experience as playing on a real 3DS, but it's a surprisingly nice way to play. RetroArch works, PS2 works, Nintendo 3DS works. Three for three. Surely the next one would be fine too, right? Not quite.

Breath of the Wild ran at 9 frames per second until an update fixed it

Breath of the Wild running on the PlayStation 5 is probably one of the coolest things I've seen come out of the PS5 homebrew scene. I've seen demonstrations of people getting really good performance with this emulator, even better than on the Nintendo Switch, and some are reporting around 60 FPS. Naturally, this was one of the games I was most excited to test. The Wii U emulator is part of the same PS5 emulation project as the 3DS one.

I installed the game and tried launching it, and the first thing it did was tell me that a system update was required. I was sitting there thinking there's absolutely no way I'm updating my jailbroken PS5 just to play Zelda. Fortunately, it wasn't talking about the PlayStation. It actually needed the Wii U game's own update. So I installed the correct Breath of the Wild update, launched the game again, and it worked. Well, technically. It ran at 9 frames per second.

I tried to fix this. I lowered the resolution to 720p and changed graphics settings, shader settings and performance options. I checked that JIT was available, and the logs confirmed the emulator was using its multicore recompiler, which made everything a bit weird. After proper research and a chat session with the developer behind the project, we found out I needed to update one of my homebrew tools from version 2.5b to 2.6b, which is only available through a Discord server. After that, we got nice FPS, and I owe thanks to the person who helped me.

PS3 emulation compiled from source but stalled on a missing font

The last two emulators are where things get really interesting, because they cover two consoles I never expected to see emulated on a PlayStation 5. First, PlayStation 3. You would think that would be an obvious thing to have by now, but emulating the PS3 is extremely complicated, and the project I tried is still highly experimental. This isn't some polished emulator you download from a store. It's an early PS5 port of RPCS3, the well known PlayStation 3 emulator.

When I started, I didn't even have a ready to install PS5 version, so I had to compile it myself. To be clear, I didn't create a PlayStation 3 emulator from scratch. The developer had already written the port; I took its source code and built a PS5 application from it. To do that, I installed Ubuntu Linux inside Windows, then set up the build tools, the PlayStation 5 SDK, graphics drivers, compilers and a bunch of libraries I would never normally touch. Every time I fixed one error, another appeared: missing this, missing that, wrong compiler, another missing dependency. At one point I was honestly wondering why I was spending my entire day doing this.

After all that, we got it to compile a real PS5 executable. I transferred it to the console, and initially it wouldn't launch. After even more troubleshooting, the app started, except the entire screen was black. Hours of work, black screen. But here's the interesting part: the RPCS3 log showed the emulator was doing a lot more than I thought. It had detected the PS5 GPU, initialized the Vulkan graphics renderer, recognized my DualSense controller and even started the emulator's big picture interface.

So why was I staring at a black screen? The log showed it failed to initialize a font. After all that compiling, all those graphics drivers and all those errors, apparently we got stuck because the interface couldn't load the font it needed. I tried fixing that too, but unfortunately I did not get a PlayStation 3 game running. I still think this is a really interesting milestone.

Halo and Halo 2 run on PS5 through an original Xbox emulator

After that experience, I was ready for one of these projects to give me an actual win, which brings me to the last emulator and probably the weirdest of all: original Xbox emulation on a PlayStation 5. I had Halo and Halo 2 running, and of all the console combinations I tested, this has to be one of my favorites. Xbox games running on PlayStation hardware is such a strange thing to see, especially for a console generation where PlayStation and Xbox were direct competitors.

This one gave me plenty of problems too. Initially, the emulator couldn't confirm the jailbreak because its helper payload wasn't responding, so I had to mess around with the loader, get the necessary emulator files in place and work out why the game wasn't launching. For a while I kept ending up on a black screen. After sorting out the setup, we got it working, which means my PS5 can now actually run original Xbox games.

I don't want to pretend every original Xbox game is going to run perfectly. This emulator is still being developed, and I haven't tested a huge library yet. But the fact that we can even do this is incredible, and out of everything I tried, it's one of the biggest surprises.

Bonus: Xbox 360 emulation runs even better than original Xbox

So that's six different emulators, a lot of troubleshooting and a surprisingly mixed set of results. There's a bonus, though: Xbox 360 emulation is also working on the PlayStation 5, and it's "absolutely gorgeous." It actually works better than the original Xbox. I don't know why, but it's very, very fluid.

All the games I tried on the Xbox 360 emulator on the PlayStation 5 worked seamlessly. It's a really cool emulator. Now I need to decide what to test next: go back and try to get PS3 emulation running, or test a bunch more original Xbox games and see how far that emulator can go.

Which would you rather see tested next on the PS5: PS3 emulation or a wider range of original Xbox games?