Whereas PlayStation 3 and earlier were rather specialized consoles, today’s consoles like the PlayStation 5 are essentially x86-based gaming PCs in a fancy case, with custom firmware to lock it all down. Once you’re past those gates, however, you can use it to run pretty much anything. Naturally, this also means porting PlayStation 2 and Xbox 1 emulators to the PS5, in the form of the PS5X2 and XPSemu projects respectively.
In addition, Videocardz reports that Wine is being ported to the PS5 as its Proton iteration popularized by Valve’s SteamOS. This ‘PP’ project — for PS5 Proton — has no public releases yet, but it could mean that playing Windows games on your PS5 could also become reality.
The PS5X2 project is the most complete so far, offering a quite complete port of the PCSX2 PS2 emulator, including GPU acceleration via the Vulkan API using the PS5Vulkan project. Based on the list, quite a few games work at full speed, even when rendered at multiple times their original resolution.
In comparison, the XPSemu project – based on the xemu Xbox emulator – only just hit Alpha 1 level, with still sketchy game compatibility, though Halo 2 seems to run well at least. Unfortunately, none of these emulators seem to support playing the game directly from the original DVD, so you need to have that disc image taking up precious space on the PS5’s SSD.
Emulating one computer on another is an old technique. Games are the same way.
