PS3 Recompiled Games List: What Actually Runs So Far (2026)

Let us deal with the question most people arrive with, because it is the wrong one.

There is no PS3 recompilation of Sonic Unleashed. Sonic Unleashed Recompiled, the port everybody has played, is built from the Xbox 360 version of the game. Its own documentation says the PS3 files cannot be used, because that build's formatting is PS3 specific and supporting it would mean starting an entirely separate recompilation from scratch. No such project exists. The community catalogues that track this scene list no PS3 Sonic Unleashed project either.

The confusion is understandable. Every write up of PS3 recompilation cites Sonic Unleashed as the proof that the technique works, because it is the flagship of the sibling 360 scene. The name travels, the console does not.

Something real did happen, though, and it happened on 7 October 2026. The PS3 recompilation toolkit shipped a release whose notes open with five words that had never been true before: "Two titles in game." That is the story, and this page is the running list.

Two ground rules first. Every project here requires game files from a copy you legally own, and the projects ship engine code rather than game content. And this scene is four months past its first line of code, so treat every status below as a snapshot that will move.

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The List: PS3 Games With Recompilation Projects

That is a longer list than the 360 scene had at the same age. It is also a list where the Download column says None twenty times in a row, and that needs its own section.

Nothing Here Has a Download

Not one project on this page publishes a build. Across every repository involved, the release asset count is zero.

This is the single most important fact about PS3 recompilation right now, and it is the one a headline will always leave out. "The first PS3 recomps are here" is a fair description of an engineering milestone. It is not a thing you can go and play this weekend.

What that means in practice is that every project here is source code plus instructions. Running one means setting up a build environment, obtaining the toolkit, lifting your own legally dumped game binary and compiling the result yourself. That is a reasonable afternoon for someone comfortable with a C++ toolchain and a complete non starter for everyone else.

We mention this plainly because the pattern repeats across this whole scene. A project can be a genuine technical achievement, be covered everywhere, and still have nothing for you to click. We wrote about the same gap in what happens after a game is 100% decompiled.

Guitar Hero III Is the One That Matters

If you only read about one project here, read about this one, because it is the first PS3 recompilation to produce evidence rather than a screenshot.

On 28 September 2026 the project ran the game's own built in bot through the entire Quickplay setlist. All 45 songs, on Easy, unattended, through a test harness. The result as reported by the project: 45 of 45 completed, none failed, no hangs, 100% of notes hit on an idle machine, and no black or missing frames beyond a handful of intentionally dark intros. Frame rates sat at 30 to 40 fps during songs and 50 to 60 in menus.

That is a real playthrough test, run overnight, with numbers attached. Nothing else in this scene has published anything like it.

The honest caveats come from the project too. It wants 60 fps and does not have it, which matters more here than in most games because Guitar Hero judges note timing per frame, so a busy host PC actually costs you notes. And input is PS3 pads via XInput, meaning an Xbox style controller works as a PS3 controller. Plastic guitars are not wired up yet, which is a funny thing to have to say about Guitar Hero.

Tornado Outbreak, and Why That Game

The second title in game is a 2009 licensed platformer that nobody remembers, and the reason it was picked is the most instructive thing on this page.

The developer swept all 1,019 decryptable disc executables in their collection looking for one specific property: the lowest load on the PS3's SPUs. Tornado Outbreak won with 17,138 functions, 103 imports and a single tiny SPU image, against Guitar Hero III's 28,987 functions, 229 imports and five SPU images.

That single SPU image turned out to be a memory copy engine the main CPU drives by mailbox, which is about as simple as PS3 code gets.

So the first games to run natively are not the ones anybody would choose. They are the ones shaped to make the hard part easy. Expect that to stay true for a while, because the hard part is not going anywhere.

It runs at roughly 10 to 16 fps, and a comic style white screen transition a few seconds into the first level does not clear. That is where it is.

The Counterweight: Shadow of the Colossus

We include this one deliberately, so the table above does not read like a hype list.

The Shadow of the Colossus project lifts cleanly. All 16,114 functions, zero unhandled instructions, all eight embedded SPU modules lifted with it. It boots, opens a window, initialises the graphics system, registers both display buffers and runs its flip loop at around 250 frames per second.

It draws nothing. The flip loop is flipping an empty command stream. It stalls before it ever opens the single 6 gigabyte archive that holds the entire game.

The project says all of this itself, in its own README, in bold, with a line we wish more projects would copy: everything stated is what the binary actually did, not what it is hoped to do.

Lifting a binary cleanly and running a game are two very different achievements. A project can nail the first and be nowhere near the second.

Why the Toolkit Only Runs Games on Windows

The toolkit builds on Windows, macOS and Linux. It only runs a game on Windows, and it is unusually direct about that.

Its own platform table has a row called "Runs a recompiled game" with three entries: yes, no, no. The README then explains why, which is rarer than it should be.

The blocker is shared by both non Windows platforms, and it is not the graphics. It is the boot scaffold that loads a lifted image and reaches the game's first instruction, which was written against Windows APIs for thread creation, memory allocation, exception handling and stack walking, and which is compiled per game rather than into the library. Work in earlier releases got that code compiling on POSIX and put it under continuous integration so it cannot rot. Actually running it is the step that remains.

The second blocker is one real graphics backend each. Windows draws through Direct3D 12. macOS has a Metal backend that clears, flips, fetches vertices and caches pipeline state, and needs the game's own fragment programs and textures to reach parity. Linux has an opt in Vulkan backend that passes every test scene including render to texture and multiple render targets, and has never run a title. The Linux default is a headless software triangle filler that exists so continuous integration can prove the command stream produced the right pixels on a machine with no GPU.

And then the line that made us trust the whole project: the README states that the table will keep saying no for macOS and Linux until a game actually boots to gameplay on one of them, and that building the runtime, passing the test suites and rendering test scenes are all real but none of them is that.

That is the opposite of how this scene usually talks.

Can a Handheld Run These?

No, and the reasons stack up.

Output is Windows x86-64 with a Direct3D 12 backend. In principle that points at Windows handhelds like the ROG Ally X or a Legion Go, and at a Steam Deck through Proton. In practice there is nothing to run, because no project publishes a build.

Linux is not an option yet, which rules out SteamOS natively and rules out every ARM Linux handheld twice over.

Android and ARM handhelds get nothing. This is x86 output. There is no ARM target, and no project is working toward one.

If you want PS3 games on a handheld today, that is an emulation job, and we cover where the line sits in PS3 emulation on handhelds and the best handhelds for PS3 emulation. Android specifically is covered in PS3 emulation on Android handhelds.

Why the PS3 Took Until 2026

The N64 scene has been producing playable ports for two years. The 360 scene has thirteen. The PS3 has three games that reach gameplay, and the reason is the Cell.

Every other console in this scene has a CPU that translates in a reasonably familiar way. The PS3 has four problems at once.

The main CPU is a 64 bit PowerPC core with custom extensions and vector instructions, which is the manageable part.

Six SPUs are separate 128 bit vector processors with their own proprietary instruction set, 256KB of local memory each, and explicit DMA. Code does not just run on them. The main CPU hands them jobs and they fetch their own data. Translating a game means translating the SPU programs too, and understanding how the game farmed work out to them.

The operating system underneath is a proprietary kernel with around 300 system calls, every one of which has to be replaced by something native.

The libraries are over a hundred dynamically loaded modules with intricate dependencies on each other.

That is why a project's first question is not "is this game good" but "how little does it use the SPUs". And it is why the toolkit's approach is working at all: it replaces the console's operating system with native implementations rather than emulating it, which is also what makes a finished port light enough to be worth having.

The toolkit itself is MIT licensed, started in March 2026, and its latest release took around thirty pull requests from six people. Several of those contributions are AI assisted, which is now normal across this scene and which we unpack in the recomp scene's AI problem.

Recompilation vs RPCS3

Worth being clear about the trade, because these two are not competing for the same job yet.

RPCS3 plays the library. Somewhere around 70% of the PS3 catalogue is playable in it, it runs on Windows, Linux and macOS, it has a mature disc workflow, and it asks for a strong CPU because it is emulating the Cell live. We cover playing PS3 games straight from a disc drive in RPCS3 separately.

Recompilation plays three games. But each one, once it is finished, is a native program with none of the live translation overhead, which means lower requirements for that specific game, deeper moddability, and a port that survives whether or not anyone maintains an emulator.

That is the same bargain the 360 scene made, and it paid off there. The 360 list went from one game to thirteen in about eighteen months. Whether the PS3 follows depends almost entirely on whether SPU translation gets easier.

How to Follow This

New PS3 projects appear on GitHub before they appear anywhere else, usually as a repository named after a game. Watch for the toolkit's release notes, which have become the most reliable summary of what actually runs, and read a project's own status section rather than its description.

The tell for a serious project here is a README that says what the binary did rather than what the developer hopes it will do. The three projects worth watching all have one.

We update this page as projects move. The hub list for every console is the cross platform recompiled games list.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a PS3 recompilation of Sonic Unleashed?

No. Sonic Unleashed Recompiled is built from the Xbox 360 version, and its own documentation states that PS3 game files cannot be used because supporting them would require an entirely separate recompilation. No PS3 project for the game exists, and the catalogues that track this scene do not list one.

What was the first PS3 game to be recompiled?

flOw was the first title the toolkit targeted, back in March 2026. The first games to reach actual gameplay were Guitar Hero III, Tornado Outbreak and The Simpsons Arcade Game, which the toolkit's 7 October 2026 release notes confirmed as the first titles in game.

Can I download a PS3 recompiled port?

Not today. No project in this scene publishes a build. Every one of them is source code you compile yourself, using game files dumped from a copy you own.

Can I play these on a Steam Deck?

No. The toolkit only runs a game on Windows, its Linux backend has never run a title, and no project ships a build to run in the first place. For PS3 games on a Deck today, use RPCS3.

Can I play them on an Android handheld?

No. The output is x86-64 Windows code and there is no ARM target. For PS3 on Android, the emulator route is the only one, through aPS3e or the newer PS3Native, and it is covered in PS3 emulation on Android handhelds.

Is recompilation better than RPCS3?

For a finished port, yes, usually: a native program has no live translation cost, so it runs lighter than the same game under emulation. Right now RPCS3 plays most of the library and recompilation plays three games, so for actually playing something, emulation wins easily.

Why is the PS3 so much harder than the Xbox 360?

The 360 has a PowerPC CPU and a conventional structure. The PS3 adds six separate vector processors with their own instruction set and their own local memory, a proprietary kernel with around 300 system calls, and over a hundred interdependent system modules. Translating a PS3 game means translating the work it farmed out to those processors too.

Are these projects legal?

They ship code, not game content, and require files from a copy you own, which is the same preservation footing as responsible emulation. Our emulation legal status explainer covers the wider picture.

Which PS3 games are most likely to get ports next?

The ones that barely use the SPUs, not the ones people most want. The developer behind the three working projects selects targets by sweeping their collection for the lowest SPU load, which is how a forgotten 2009 platformer became the second PS3 game to run natively.

Related Guides

• Recompiled Games List: Every Native Port by System for the cross platform picture
• Xbox 360 Recompiled Games List for the scene this one is following
• N64 Recompiled Games List for the most productive corner of the scene
• Decompilation and Recompilation Explained for the underlying concepts
• What Happens After a Game Is 100% Decompiled for why a milestone rarely means a download
• PS3 Emulation on Handhelds in 2026 for what you can actually play now
• Best Handhelds for PS3 Emulation for which device to buy
• PS3 Emulation on Android Handhelds for the ARM side
• RPCS3 Can Now Play PS3 Games Straight From a Disc Drive for the emulation alternative
• Xbox 360 vs PS3 Emulation on Handhelds for the wider seventh generation picture
• The Recomp Scene's AI Problem for how to judge a project before building it
• A Jailbroken PS5 Now Plays PS2 Discs for the other PlayStation story this week

Written 11 October 2026. Project statuses, function counts, frame rate figures, playthrough results, platform support tables, release dates, licensing and contributor counts come from each project's own README, release notes and the GitHub API, retrieved 11 October 2026. The absence of a PS3 Sonic Unleashed project was checked against GitHub search, including repositories created in the preceding week, and against the community recompilation catalogue. The RPCS3 compatibility figure is the toolkit's own characterisation. We have not built or run any of this software, and we publish no performance figures of our own. Every port requires game files from a copy you legally own.