Every Console a Jailbroken PS5 Now Emulates

2026-10-28 · Explainer

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Six weeks ago, a jailbroken PS5 ran almost nothing interesting.

Today it emulates the PS2, the GameCube, the Wii, the Wii U, the 3DS, the DS, the Switch, the original Xbox, the Xbox 360, the SNES, and another forty odd systems through RetroArch. There is an app store to install it all from.

That is not a gradual build up. Every project on this page was created between 18 September and 4 October 2026, and they all exist for the same reason, which almost nobody is naming.

This is the map, what each project actually is, and which of them are serious.

First, the Thing Holding All of It Up

The PS5 has an AMD GPU, and for years the homebrew scene had no proper way to draw with it. Everything was software rendered or ran through a thin OpenGL layer, which meant emulators were possible and useless.

In late September, the scene finished a native Vulkan driver for the PS5 GPU, a port of Mesa's RADV with a custom back end for the console's display and command submission hardware. Every project below runs on it. That one piece of plumbing is why the entire list appeared in a month.

We wrote about the driver when it landed, in the piece on native Switch emulation reaching the PS5. If you only take one thing from this page, make it that one: the news was never the emulators. The emulators were inevitable the moment the driver worked.

The Map

Ordered by how finished each one is, not by console age.

The install route for most of them is RecompStore, an app store that runs on the console itself and handles the awkward business of getting your own disc images into the folder each emulator expects. We cover it in recomp launchers and stores.

None of These Are New Emulators

This is worth being clear about, because the coverage tends to imply otherwise.

Not one project on this page wrote an emulator. PS5SX2 is PCSX2. Porpoise is Dolphin. PS5X360 is Xenia Canary. XPSemu is xemu. PS5-ECAM is Cemu, Azahar, melonDS and Eden stacked together. The SNES one is Snes9x 1.63.

The work, and it is real work, is in two places. One is the platform layer: making a PC emulator's recompiler, memory model and renderer function inside a console sandbox that was designed specifically to prevent that. The other is the front end, because a PC emulator's settings window is miserable on a television, and every one of these projects has built a launcher with box art, per game settings and a controller driven in game menu.

That second part is more valuable than it sounds. It is the difference between a port and something you would actually hand to someone else in your house.

The CPU Is the Wall, Everywhere

Here is the pattern that only shows up when you read all seven projects' documentation in a row.

The PS5's GPU is not the problem. It has headroom in essentially every one of these.

PS5-ECAM profiled Breath of the Wild at 4K on a real console and found 54 to 61 fps with the GPU only 58 to 71 percent busy. They then cut the GPU's idle time substantially and the frame rate did not move, because the limit was the emulated CPU. XPSemu lists "CPU-bound" in its own known limitations, flatly, as the reason heavy scenes drop below their cap.

That is what you would expect. The PS5's CPU is eight Zen 2 cores at around 3.5 GHz, which was a reasonable laptop chip in 2020, and emulating a PowerPC or a Xenon or an Emotion Engine is close to the most single thread hostile job in computing. Pixels are the cheap axis here. Instructions are not.

Which explains the other pattern. Three separate projects have added frame generation in the last three weeks. PS5-ECAM did it for the Wii U, 3DS and Switch sides, Porpoise added it in version 4.0, and there is now a standalone frame generation library for PS5 homebrew built on optical flow. When the GPU has spare capacity and the CPU does not, interpolating extra frames is one of the only levers left that raises the number on screen.

If you want the background on what that technique actually does, frame generation on handhelds covers it, and the trade offs are identical here.

Which Ones Are Actually Worth It

Star counts are the worst possible guide to this, and we have been caught by that before. Here is what the primary evidence supports.

PS5SX2 for PS2 is the one that is genuinely good. It is the oldest, the most developed and the most used, it runs at internal resolutions no handheld approaches, it reads discs from the console's drive, and it has HD texture packs and a four player multitap. We wrote it up in PS2 discs on a jailbroken PS5.

Porpoise for GameCube and Wii is the most pleasant. Dolphin is a mature, well behaved emulator and the PS5 has more than enough power for it. The launcher is the nicest of the group and it needs no BIOS files at all, so there is nothing to dump before you start.

PS5 RetroArch is the practical one. If what you want is everything up to the Nintendo 64 and the PS1, this is one install instead of six, and the cores underneath it are the same ones you already know.

PS5-ECAM is the most ambitious and the least settled. Four systems, a huge feature list, releases several times a week, and a project roadmap that openly states the October rewrite has not been run on a PS5 yet. Its own compatibility table lists seven reported games. Fascinating, and not the one to judge the scene by. Our full piece on it goes through the evidence.

PS5X360 is a tech demo with excellent manners. Xbox 360 emulation is hard on a gaming PC, let alone here. The project is honest about it, names the games that crash, and has by far the most open bug reports of any project on this page. Treat it as something remarkable to look at rather than a way to play 360 games.

XPSemu is the one to re-check rather than recommend. Still labelled alpha, and it is the only project here that has not had a commit in roughly two weeks while everything else shipped. Two weeks is not abandonment and this scene moves in bursts, so this is a watch item, not a verdict.

Worth noting for anyone who read our piece on the original Xbox running on Android yesterday: the two projects have diverged in an interesting way. The Android app rewrote its core and deleted the BIOS requirement entirely, so it needs no console ROMs at all. The PS5 port is still xemu underneath, so it still wants your own MCPX boot ROM and flash ROM dumped from a console you own. Same console, opposite answers to the hardest setup question.

Two Traps

Same named copies. At least three of these projects have zero activity clones sitting under other accounts, carrying the original's description word for word. Download counts and release dates tell you which is real. Star counts do not, and search results are worse. We do not publish links to any of them, so look for the project by name and check that what you find is the one shipping releases.

The old names. Several of these have been renamed since launch, and the guides have not caught up. PS5-ECAM was PS5CEMU-HAR until 20 October. If you are reading a comparison that uses the old name, it was written before the Switch support existed.

The Catch, and It Is a Big One

Everything above needs a jailbroken PS5 on firmware 13.60 or lower.

Sony closed the exploit behind this entire wave in firmware 14.00 on 16 September, which shipped before the exploit was even published. A PS5 cannot be downgraded. And firmware 14.10, on 1 October, made itself the minimum version for PlayStation Network, so a console able to run any of this is a console permanently cut off from signing in, the store, online play and cloud saves.

The jailbreak is also tethered. It does not survive a cold boot, so you re-run it every time the console fully powers off.

We go through all of that properly, including why the privately reported exploit for firmware 14 would not help even if it were released, in the firmware 14 gate.

The short version: this list is a wonderful thing to put on a console that was already stranded on old firmware. It is a bad trade for the console you play new games on.

What This Means If You Own a Handheld

Mostly, that your handheld is fine.

For everything up to and including the PS2, a modern Android handheld or a Steam Deck already plays the same libraries with the same emulators, portably, with no console modification and nothing to lose when an update lands. The PS5 versions look better on a 4K television. They do not play more games.

Where the PS5 genuinely wins is the heavy end and the big screen. 6x PS2 with HD textures, 3DS at ten times native resolution, Wii U at 4K. Those are real advantages and no handheld is close to them.

Where it loses is everything else, and for the two dual screen systems it loses badly, because a handheld has a real touchscreen and a television does not.

Our best handhelds for PS2 emulation, best handhelds for Wii emulation and best handhelds for DS and 3DS emulation guides cover where those lines sit by device.

Where We Stop

We cover what these projects are, what they need and who they suit. We do not cover how to jailbreak a console, and we do not link to BIOS files, boot ROMs, keys, firmware or game files. Every project on this page ships none of those either, and several say so in bold on their own front page.

Questions People Ask

What can a jailbroken PS5 emulate in 2026?

PS2, GameCube, Wii, Wii U, 3DS, DS, Switch, original Xbox, Xbox 360 and SNES through dedicated apps, plus roughly forty more systems through a RetroArch port with 35 cores. All of it arrived between mid September and early October 2026.

Why did all of these appear at once?

Because the homebrew scene finished a native Vulkan driver for the PS5's GPU in late September, a port of Mesa's RADV. Before that there was no proper way to draw with the console's graphics hardware, so emulators were technically possible and practically pointless. Every project on this list runs on that driver.

Which PS5 emulator is the best one to start with?

PS5SX2 for PS2 if you want the most finished and most impressive. Porpoise for GameCube and Wii if you want the easiest, since it needs no BIOS files. The RetroArch port if you mostly want older systems and would rather install one app than six.

Can a PS5 emulate the Switch?

Yes, through a native port of the Eden emulator, which is bundled into PS5-ECAM alongside Wii U, 3DS and DS support. It is early. There are no public compatibility reports for the Switch side yet, eight days after it was added.

Is Xbox 360 emulation on PS5 any good?

Not yet, and the project does not pretend otherwise. It is built on Xenia Canary, it is labelled experimental, online play through Xbox LIVE is partly working, and it has the largest open bug list of any project here. It is an impressive thing to exist rather than a way to play 360 games.

Do I need my own BIOS files?

It depends on the system. PS2 needs a BIOS dumped from a PS2 you own. The original Xbox port needs your own MCPX boot ROM and flash ROM. GameCube, Wii and DS need nothing. The Switch needs your own console's keys and firmware. Nothing is bundled with any of these projects and we do not link to any of it.

Will these ever run on newer PS5 firmware?

Not through anything public today. Firmware 14.00 closed the exploit on 16 September 2026, a PS5 cannot be downgraded, and the separate hypervisor bypass this kind of homebrew needs still stops working after 13.60. A private kernel exploit for firmware 14 has been reported, but kernel access alone is not enough. This could change, so treat that as true today rather than forever.

Is this better than using a handheld?

For PS2 and below, no. A handheld plays the same games with the same emulators and needs no console modification. The PS5 wins on the heavy end and on a big screen: much higher internal resolutions, HD texture packs and 4K Wii U. It loses on portability, on touch input for DS and 3DS, and on the fact that running it costs you PlayStation Network.

Related Reading

• All Four Nintendo Systems on One Jailbroken PS5 App
• The Firmware 14 Gate
• A Jailbroken PS5 Now Plays PS2 Discs
• The Jailbroken PS5 Now Runs Switch Games Natively
• A Jailbroken PS5 Now Runs Your Steam Library
• Recomp Launchers and Stores
• The Original Xbox Now Runs on Android Handhelds
• Best Handhelds for PS2 Emulation
• Best Handhelds for Wii Emulation
• Best Handhelds for DS and 3DS Emulation
• Frame Generation on Handhelds, Explained

Written 28 October 2026. Project creation dates, release tags, release dates, open issue counts, licences, commit activity and feature descriptions all come from each project's own README, release notes and the GitHub API, retrieved 28 October 2026. The measured Breath of the Wild profile comes from PS5-ECAM's own driver performance document. The Vulkan driver's role is as described by the projects that depend on it. Firmware dates and the PlayStation Network minimum version requirement are as reported by Engadget, TechSpot, TechPowerUp and Notebookcheck during September and October 2026. This scene ships multiple releases a week across several projects, so maturity assessments here are a snapshot of this date. We have not run any of this software and we publish no performance figures of our own. We do not cover console jailbreaking, and we do not link to BIOS files, boot ROMs, keys, firmware or game files.