All Four Nintendo Systems Now Run on One Jailbroken PS5 App. Seven Games Are Confirmed Working.

2026-10-28 · News and analysis

Affiliate disclosure: This guide contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you. Learn more.

The pitch is almost too good. One app on a jailbroken PS5, four Nintendo systems inside it, built for a television and a DualSense. Wii U at 4K. 3DS at ten times its native resolution. DS with save states and RetroAchievements. Switch with frame generation.

All of that is real. Version 5.1.0 went up this morning. The project is genuine, it is open source, and it is being worked on at a pace that is honestly a little frightening.

Three things in the coverage are wrong, though, and one of them decides whether you can use any of it.

The Short Version

• The app is PS5-ECAM, and it is real. Version 5.1.0 published at 06:08 UTC on 28 October 2026, a 75 MB download, licensed GPL-3.0 or later.
• It bundles four emulators in one launcher. Cemu for the Wii U, Azahar for the 3DS, melonDS for the DS, and Eden by way of its PS5 port for the Switch.
• It was called PS5CEMU-HAR until eight days ago. The rename happened at version 5.0.0 on 20 October, which is the version that added the Switch. Most of the coverage and most of the guides still use the old name.
• "Full speed" is not the project's claim. Its own compatibility table lists seven reported games across all four systems, two of which crash. The Switch and DS sections of that table are empty.
• Its own roadmap says the October rebuild has not been run on a PS5. It lists fifteen things still to check on real hardware.
• Breath of the Wild at 4K is limited by the CPU, and the project measured it. 54 to 61 fps with the GPU only 58 to 71 percent busy. More GPU would not help.
• The Switch side can use Lossless Scaling for frame generation, if you supply your own purchased copy of its Windows DLL. On a PlayStation.
• The 3DS side can stream games straight off your own 3DS, with no dumping step at all. This is the cleanest route in the whole project.
• Firmware 13.60 is the ceiling, and it is now a hard one. Sony closed the exploit in 14.00, then made 14.10 the minimum version for PlayStation Network. A PS5 that can run this is a PS5 that is off PSN for good.
• None of this is a handheld. We get into whether it can become one further down, and the honest answer is "partly, and not for the DS."

What It Actually Is

PS5-ECAM is a launcher. That word undersells it, because the launcher is doing the hard part.

Four separate emulators already existed as PS5 ports, each with its own quirks and its own setup. What this project does is compile all four, wrap them in one interface designed for a couch and a controller, and make them behave like a single console. Shared box art from GameTDB. A page for each game. Per game settings. The same in game menu on every system, on the same button combination. Thirty one languages.

The app ships no keys, no firmware, no BIOS and no games, and says so at the top of every document it has. The Switch side will not start without keys and firmware dumped from a Switch you own. The DS side is the only one that needs nothing, because melonDS has its own free BIOS replacements.

There are small touches throughout that tell you someone cared. Each of four DualSense controllers gets its own light bar colour on the Wii U, matching how the PS5 numbers its players. DS games that were held sideways, like Hotel Dusk, can rotate the whole display. The two screens on the DS and 3DS can be pushed apart on screen, the way a real hinge holds them. Blowing into the DS microphone is mapped to holding down the right stick.

One more detail worth knowing if you used the old version. The title ID never changed, so an existing PS5CEMU-HAR install updates in place and keeps its saves, settings and games exactly where they are.

Seven Games

Here is the part that is missing from every article about this.

The project keeps a compatibility document. It is reports from real consoles, it is honest about being incomplete, and it says plainly that a game not listed simply has not been reported yet. That is the right way to run one.

As of today it contains seven games.

The Nintendo DS section does not exist. The Nintendo Switch section does not exist either, eight days after the Switch was added.

A Super Smash Bros. for Wii U entry was removed from the table on 22 October, on the project owner's word that the report did not hold up.

Set that against the claim circulating in the larger PS5 jailbreak guides, which is that the Wii U and 3DS side of this runs at "full speed." The project has never said that. Its own evidence is one Wii U game at roughly 60 fps, one that needs a mod disabled, one with missing textures, and two that crash.

This is not a criticism of the project. Seven honest reports beat a hundred confident ones. It is a criticism of everyone repeating a performance claim that the project itself has not made, about four emulators where two of them have no public test results at all.

Its Own Roadmap Says the Rebuild Has Not Run on a Console

The project publishes a roadmap. It was edited the day before 5.1.0 shipped, and it contains a sentence that no press release would ever carry:

The October rebuild has not run on a PS5. The PC preview draws the launcher, and everything else was checked by reading the code and compiling it.

Under that sits a numbered list of fifteen things to verify on real hardware, written as test steps. Quit a game and come back to the library, on each system in turn. Check the screen gap in every layout. Confirm the graphic packs download on a first Wii U start. Play a Wii U game with four controllers and confirm each light bar gets its own colour. Install an update and confirm the old files move where they should.

Be fair about what this means. It is scoped to the October launcher rewrite, not to the emulators underneath it, and parts of 5.1.0 clearly were confirmed on hardware. The Switch mods fix was verified on a PS5 by the person who reported it. The fix for updates taking half an hour was timed on a contributor's own console, and the project cites the number.

But the honest read of a project that documents itself this well is that 5.1.0 is a fast moving beta with a very good changelog. The fourteenth and fifteenth items on that list are both about 5.1.0's own headline features. The release notes also warn that updating from the previous version uses the previous version's broken updater, which can sit at "0 of 0 MB" for several minutes before it moves.

Treat it accordingly. It is exciting software. It is not finished software, and it does not claim to be.

Breath of the Wild at 4K Is a CPU Problem

This is the most useful thing in the entire project, and it is buried in a document most people will never open.

Someone profiled Breath of the Wild at 4K on an actual PS5 on 13 October. The result: 54 to 61 fps, a median of 56.5 over the last eighty seconds, with the GPU only 58 to 71 percent busy.

That second number is the whole story. The GPU had headroom. The frame rate was being set by something else.

The profile found where the time went. Cemu's graphics thread spent 13 to 18 percent of its life blocked inside the PS5's own command submission call. It spent roughly another tenth of its CPU time reading the clock, because reading the clock on a PS5 is a system call that costs about 890 nanoseconds, where the same read on a Linux PC costs about twenty. And it spent 10 to 20 percent of its time simply waiting for the emulated CPU to give it something to draw.

On the emulated side, one core was 83 to 92 percent busy, and about a fifth of that was not the game's code at all. It was mutex contention, a timer spinlock taken ten million times a second, memory fences around every fibre switch, and the cost of emulating thread local storage.

Then they fixed a pile of it. The graphics thread's idle time went from 8 to 19 percent up to 30 to 55 percent. Its time waiting on the GPU fell from 14 percent to 1 to 3 percent. The frame rate stayed at about 58.

That is what a CPU bound workload looks like when you measure it properly. The project's own conclusion is that the next limit is the emulated CPU, and it is correct.

Two things follow from this.

More resolution is nearly free, and more frame rate is not. The same driver reportedly holds 4K at 60 with the Switch emulator while the GPU sits around 19 percent busy, and mostly 60 at 8K at around 55 percent. That is why the 3DS side can offer ten times native resolution and the Wii U side can talk about 8K. Pixels are the cheap axis here. Emulating a PowerPC chip on a cut down Zen 2 is the expensive one.

This is the same wall we keep writing about. It is why PS3 emulation on a PS5 is disappointing despite the GPU, why the PS6 handheld rumour maths works out the way it does, and why a modern x86 handheld with a faster single core can beat a console at jobs like this. Emulation is a single thread problem far more often than a graphics problem, and a PS5's eight cores at 3.5 GHz do not change that.

Frame Generation on a Wii U Game

Both the Wii U and 3DS sides can now generate frames. The implementation only engages when a game is taking two or more display refreshes per frame, so a 30 fps game gets shown at 60 and a game already hitting the target is left alone. It costs the GPU roughly two milliseconds per generated frame at 4K and adds a little latency.

Given the section above, this is a smarter design choice than it first looks. If the ceiling is the emulated CPU, interpolating on a GPU with headroom is one of the few things that can actually raise the number on screen.

The Switch side is where it gets strange. By default it uses the same community interpolator. But if you place your own copy of Lossless.dll, taken from the Lossless Scaling you bought on Steam, into a folder on the console, the Switch side uses Lossless Scaling's frame generation instead. The release notes say it is steadier, with fewer artefacts on grass and water, and the boot log records which one ran.

So the current best frame generation for emulated Switch games on a PlayStation 5 is a Windows utility's library, purchased separately, dropped into a homebrew folder. That is a genuinely new sentence.

If you want the background on what these techniques do and where they fall apart, we cover that in frame generation on handhelds and in whether DLSS belongs in emulators at all.

The 3DS Side Can Play Straight Off Your Own 3DS

This one deserves more attention than the 4K headline.

Azahar supports Artic Base, which streams a game from a real 3DS over your network. The 3DS does the reading, the emulator does the running. PS5-ECAM exposes it directly, and the same screen runs a setup tool that copies your 3DS's own system files across.

Two things make it notable. It needs no keys from you, because Azahar's own are built in exactly as they are in its official desktop builds. And it skips the dumping step entirely, which is the part of 3DS emulation that stops most people before they start.

If you own a 3DS, this is the cleanest possible version of playing your own games. The cartridge stays in the console it belongs to.

It took work to get here, too. A contributor fixed the 3DS system update path, fixed a New 3DS setup crash and fixed Artic Base's connections, testing on their own PS5 against their own New 3DS XL.

For the desktop and handheld version of this, our Azahar setup guide covers the emulator itself.

Can You Get This on a Handheld Screen?

This is the question we care about most, and we need to be careful, because the answer is partly assembled from projects that were never built to work together. We have not tested any of this. What follows is a mechanism and a prediction, not a result.

The pieces exist.

Remote play from a jailbroken PS5 used to be impossible, because a modified console cannot sign in to PlayStation Network and remote play pairing goes through PSN. The homebrew scene solved that. One project produces the pairing code locally with no network account involved, which lets unofficial clients connect. Another is a complete free remote play stack for jailbroken consoles. Remote play streams the console's video output, and a homebrew app on the home screen is part of that output, so in principle PS5-ECAM should appear like anything else.

Then it gets difficult.

The second project's clients are desktop only, for Windows, Mac and Linux. That rules out Android handhelds and points at a Steam Deck or another Linux handheld as the screen. Its own documentation calls the setup experimental, warns that creating a new local console account can affect access to your existing saves, and notes that you reload the jailbreak and restart its helper after every console reboot. The first project has not been updated since the middle of last year.

And the PlayStation Portal has no touchpad. This is the part that decides it. The Portal fakes the DualSense touchpad by putting two small regions on its own touchscreen, which you tap to summon, drag across to move, and double tap to click. PS5-ECAM maps the DualSense touchpad to the touch screen on three of its four systems, as a cursor you steer.

Put those together and the prediction is uncomfortable but clear. Wii U and Switch games that are played with buttons and sticks would plausibly travel fine. DS and 3DS games that need a stylus almost certainly would not. You would be steering a cursor, through a faked touchpad, over a streamed picture, with three taps standing in for one touch. That is not Phantom Hourglass.

The project's own answer to touch is better and completely unrelated to remote play. Turn on its remote touch screen and any phone, tablet or computer on the same network opens a web page that shows the game's second screen with real touch, with nothing to install. It is a lovely feature. It is also local network only, it lets any device on that network touch your game, and while a browser is watching, the console copies that screen up to thirty times a second, so the game runs slightly slower.

Nobody has raised remote play or the Portal in the project's issue tracker, so this is not a solved problem anyone is quietly using.

The test that would settle it, for anyone with the hardware: get a jailbroken console on firmware 13.60 paired to a desktop remote play client, confirm the homebrew app appears in the stream at all, then try one button driven Wii U game and one stylus driven DS game. The first two steps are the ones we genuinely do not know the answer to. If you run it, tell us and we will update this piece with the result and the credit.

Until then, our PS5 remote play on a handheld guide covers the four routes that do work today, all of which assume an unmodified console.

What a Handheld Still Does Better

Everything above is real, and almost none of it should change what you buy.

Firmware 13.60 is the ceiling, and the door is now shut. The exploit this depends on covers firmware 7.00 through 13.60. Sony closed the hole in firmware 14.00 on 16 September, which went out before the exploit was even published, so a lot of consoles were already past it on day one. You cannot downgrade a PS5. Whether yours qualifies was decided for you by whenever it last updated itself.

And staying on 13.60 now costs you the console. Firmware 14.10, on 1 October, made itself the minimum version for PlayStation Network authentication. A console on 13.60 is a console with no PSN, no store, no online play and no cloud saves, permanently, while new games increasingly require newer firmware. A kernel exploit for 14.00 and 14.10 has been reported, privately, but even that would not get you here: the separate hypervisor bypass this kind of homebrew depends on still stops working after 13.60. We go through all of this in the firmware 14 gate.

The jailbreak is tethered. It does not survive a cold boot. Every time the console fully powers off you run the exploit again and reload the enabler before the app will start.

A handheld needs none of that. You buy it, install an emulator, and play DS and 3DS games this afternoon. No firmware lottery, nothing to lose when an update lands, and no choice to make between emulation and your own game library.

A handheld has a real touchscreen, which for the two dual screen systems is not a nicety. It is the input method the games were designed around.

A handheld is portable, which is the entire point of this site.

So the honest framing is the same one we reached about PS2 discs on a PS5. If you already have a jailbroken console stranded on old firmware under a 4K television, this is a remarkable thing to put on it, and the 3DS side at ten times native resolution with your real 3DS feeding it is something no handheld can match. If you do not, modifying a PS5 to play Nintendo games means giving up PlayStation Network on a console you paid for, to get a worse DS experience than a device that costs a fraction of it.

For what we actually recommend, the best handhelds for DS and 3DS emulation covers the dual screen problem properly, and Wii U emulation on handhelds covers where Cemu runs well.

What It Requires, and Where We Stop

For completeness, because people ask:

1. A PS5 that already runs homebrew, on firmware 13.60 or lower, with a homebrew enabler or an ELF loader.
2. Your own game dumps, from hardware you own. Wii U disc keys for encrypted dumps, decrypted 3DS dumps, and your Switch's own keys and firmware.
3. Patience with a project shipping multiple releases a week.

One technical note that is quietly clever. The app needs executable memory for the recompilers, and rather than depend on the enabler granting it, it allocates that memory itself and tests it by running a few bytes of real code. That is why the Wii U side runs at full speed even on setups where nothing grants it any privileges at all.

That is where this piece stops. We cover what the project is and what it needs. We do not cover how to jailbreak a console, and we do not link to keys, firmware, BIOS files or game files.

One More Thing Worth Noticing

The launcher is now ahead of the emulator it wraps.

The Switch side is built on a PS5 port of Eden maintained by someone else. That port has not had a commit in ten days. PS5-ECAM 5.1.0 ships three fixes taken from its still open pull requests: handling a game with several updates beside it, stopping a full audio buffer from killing the game, and making multi program releases like the Metal Gear Solid collection boot into the actual game.

The wrapper is doing upstream's integration work, and crediting the contributors by name while it does. That is unusual and worth saying out loud. It also means if you are comparing the two, the bundle is currently the more fixed of the two.

A request is open to add Dolphin for GameCube and Wii, which would make it five systems. A separate Dolphin port for the PS5 already exists, which we cover in the jailbroken PS5 emulator landscape.

Questions People Ask

Is PS5-ECAM the same thing as PS5CEMU-HAR?

Yes. It was renamed at version 5.0.0 on 20 October 2026, the same version that added Switch support. The app's title ID never changed, so an older install updates in place and keeps its saves, settings and games. If you are reading a guide that says PS5CEMU-HAR, it is describing this project before the Switch arrived.

Does it play Wii U, 3DS, DS and Switch games at full speed?

The project does not claim that, and its own compatibility table does not support it. That table currently lists seven reported games across all four systems, two of which crash. The DS and Switch sections are empty. One Wii U game, Breath of the Wild, is reported at about 60 fps at 1440p, and the project measured it at 54 to 61 fps at 4K. The "full speed" line comes from third party guides, not from the project.

Which PS5 firmware do I need?

13.60 or lower, with a working homebrew setup. Sony closed the underlying exploit in firmware 14.00 on 16 September 2026, and a PS5 cannot be downgraded. Firmware 14.10 then made itself the minimum version for PlayStation Network, so a console able to run this is permanently off PSN.

Do I need my own Switch keys?

Yes, for the Switch side. Your own prod.keys and your console's firmware, dumped from a Switch you own. The app ships neither, and we do not link to either. The Wii U side needs disc keys for encrypted dumps, the 3DS side needs decrypted dumps, and the DS side needs nothing because melonDS has its own free BIOS replacements.

Can I play this on a PlayStation Portal or a handheld?

Not in any confirmed way. Remote play from a jailbroken PS5 is possible through homebrew, and the main free option's clients are desktop only, which points at a Steam Deck rather than a Portal or an Android device. Nobody has demonstrated the full chain with this app. And the Portal has no real touchpad, it simulates one with two small regions of its own screen, so DS and 3DS games that need a stylus would very likely be unplayable even if the stream worked. The app's own answer is to use a phone's browser as the second screen, which needs everything on the same local network.

Why is Breath of the Wild not hitting 60 fps on a PS5?

Because the limit is the CPU, not the graphics. The project profiled it on a console: at 4K it ran 54 to 61 fps with the GPU only 58 to 71 percent busy. Emulating the Wii U's PowerPC chip on the PS5's cut down Zen 2 is the bottleneck, and the console's slow clock reading system call makes it worse. Reducing the GPU load further did not raise the frame rate.

What is the Lossless Scaling thing?

On the Switch side, frame generation normally uses a community interpolator that needs nothing extra. If you own Lossless Scaling on Steam and copy its DLL into a folder on the console, the Switch side uses Lossless Scaling's frame generation instead, which the project says is steadier with fewer artefacts on grass and water. You supply your own purchased copy. Nothing is bundled.

What is Artic Base, and why does it matter?

It streams a 3DS game from a real 3DS over your network, so the console does the reading and the emulator does the running. It means you can play your own 3DS games with no dumping step at all, and it needs no keys from you. If you own a 3DS, it is the cleanest route in the project.

Is it safe to install?

That is not a question anyone can answer for you about homebrew on a modified console. What we can say is that the code is open source under the GPL, the project documents what it does at startup in unusual detail, it publishes checksums with every release, and it ships no copyrighted Nintendo or Sony material. Running homebrew requires a modified console, which may void its warranty and breaches the platform's terms.

Will Sony patch this?

Sony cannot patch a modified console that is already past the exploit, and one on 13.60 is already locked off PlayStation Network anyway. What Sony keeps doing is closing the underlying holes in new firmware, which affects whether more consoles can join, not whether existing ones keep working.

Related Reading

• The Firmware 14 Gate: Why Your PS5 Probably Cannot Run Any of This
• Every Console a Jailbroken PS5 Now Emulates
• The Jailbroken PS5 Now Runs Switch Games Natively
• A Jailbroken PS5 Now Plays PS2 Discs
• Best Handhelds for DS and 3DS Emulation
• Wii U Emulation on Handhelds
• Azahar 3DS Setup Guide
• melonDS Setup Guide
• Cemu Setup Guide
• PS5 Remote Play on a Handheld
• Frame Generation on Handhelds, Explained

Written 28 October 2026. Version numbers, publication timestamps, file sizes, licence, feature lists, supported file formats, compatibility statuses, known issues, install requirements, the roadmap's hardware test list and the measured Breath of the Wild profile all come from the project's own README, release notes, guide, compatibility document, roadmap and driver performance document, together with the GitHub API, retrieved 28 October 2026. The upstream Switch port's commit history and the pull requests taken from it come from the same API on the same date. Firmware dates and the PlayStation Network minimum version requirement are as reported by Engadget, TechSpot, TechPowerUp and Notebookcheck during September and October 2026. The handheld section is explicitly a mechanism and a prediction rather than a test result. We have not run this software, and we publish no performance figures of our own. We do not cover console jailbreaking, and we do not link to keys, firmware, BIOS files or game files.