Modded PS5 now runs Halo 2 and other original Xbox games

Sony's PlayStation 5 can now run games made for Microsoft's first Xbox console, provided the PS5 has been jailbroken. A developer using the handle ZiZc3 published the first public build of XPSemu, labelled Alpha 1, on GitHub this week, and it already boots titles including Halo 2, Forza Motorsport and Fable: The Lost Chapters.

XPSemu is a port of xemu, the open-source original Xbox emulator for PC, and runs as a native PS5 application instead of a wrapper or libretro core. Its documentation states that the emulator translates Xbox processor code through QEMU's TCG just-in-time compiler and draws the console's NV2A graphics through xemu's Vulkan renderer. That renderer runs on RADV, Mesa's open-source AMD Vulkan driver, which the PS5_Vulkan project has brought to Sony's hardware. Developers have also shown two further projects targeting Xbox 360 games and Windows PC software running on the console, though neither has a public release.

The developer's own testing puts Halo 2 at 30 fps without modification. With a community 60 fps patch applied, the game reaches 51 to 60 fps in its opening sequence and 36 to 50 fps during gameplay. Forza Motorsport holds its 30 fps cap in menus but falls to between 15 and 21 fps while racing. Fable: The Lost Chapters runs at 22 to 30 fps in many areas and drops to 10 to 20 fps in demanding scenes, while the developer lists Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex as running smoothly.

According to the project documentation, the processor, rather than the graphics hardware, limits performance. The emulated Xbox CPU thread stays busy 85 to 97% of the time while the PS5's GPU remains largely idle. The developer attributes this to QEMU's general-purpose translator and to the PS5's Zen 2 cores, which run at 3.5GHz and trail fast desktop processors in per-core speed. Raising the internal resolution from the Xbox's native 480p up to 4x therefore costs almost no frame rate. Profiler-guided optimizations have already lifted Fable's opening from about 7 fps in early PS5 builds to between 23 and 30 fps.

XPSemu ships with its own Xbox-inspired dashboard built around the DualSense controller, featuring a cover-art game carousel, a recently played shelf, and per-game play time tracking. Users can assign each title its own resolution, display, and audio settings. The emulator also applies game patches in the Jay's Magic Patch format in memory as a game loads, leaving the original disc image unmodified, and offers an overlay that reports frame rate, frame time, and CPU load.

Running XPSemu requires a jailbroken PS5 that can load homebrew applications, along with a helper daemon called XPSemu Tools that runs alongside the kstuff payload. Users must also supply their own Xbox BIOS, MCPX boot ROM and hard-disk image dumped from original hardware, since the project ships no Microsoft code or games. Games must sit on the console's internal storage as XISO images because the emulator cannot boot from disc. The developer states that XPSemu has no affiliation with Microsoft, Sony, or the xemu project.

Alpha 1 locks the emulated Xbox to 64MB of memory, and the developer advises keeping audio DSP emulation switched off because it causes severe slowdowns in titles such as Halo 2 and Forza Motorsport. Save states are not yet supported, and resolution changes apply only between games. The project roadmap lists optional frame generation through an open-source Vulkan port of AMD's FSR 3, intended to present 30 fps games at 60 fps, alongside a save manager and further CPU optimizations.