PS5 Emulation Is Finally Catching Up to Marketing Promises

PlayStation has spent years arguing that its exclusives need PlayStation hardware, or at least a publisher willing to pay for a proper 'optimized' port. Two unrelated emulator projects just spent the last week making that argument look shaky.

SharpEmu went from, by its own developer's description, a "very early alpha stage" back in May to a build that now loads a game's eboot.bin, executes native CPU instructions, and partially handles the GPU side of things. The latest release lists ten tested games reaching a "playable" state, with developer CursedIfElse claiming six of them hit "fully playable at 60 fps" on Ars Technica. That six includes 2D fare like Tetris Forever, which is the emulation equivalent of parallel parking, and heavier lifts like Astro Bot and the PS5 remaster of Demon's Souls, which is not. "It was built completely from scratch, and this is how far we've come," CursedIfElse wrote, which is a fair brag until you remember that's six games out of a console library measured in hundreds.

Meanwhile a completely different project, KytyPS5, is doing its own version of the same trick on different hardware entirely. Deck Wizard's test, posted the same week, shows Demon's Souls booting into character creation and in-game combat on a Steam Deck OLED running SteamOS 3.8.28 and a Kyty build from late September, handheld footprint and all.

Neither emulator is near console parity, and nobody involved claims otherwise. But Sony telling publishers to expect fewer bespoke PC ports and two unofficial projects independently getting one of its hardest-to-emulate exclusives running in the same month is not a coincidence I'd bet against.