The console wars have never looked this absurd. A jailbroken PlayStation 5 can now run original Xbox games. Developer ZiZc3 has published XPSemu Alpha 1 on GitHub, a port of the open-source xemu emulator that runs as a native PS5 app — and in the developer’s own testing, an unmodified copy of Halo 2 holds 30 FPS on average. With a community 60 FPS patch applied, it reportedly reaches 51 to 60 FPS in the opening sections and 36 to 50 FPS during gameplay.
What Works — and What Doesn’t
Halo 2 is the headline act, but it isn’t alone. Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex is said to run smoothly, while other titles struggle: Forza Motorsport drops to 15-21 FPS in races, and Fable: The Lost Chapters falls to 10-20 FPS in heavy scenes. The bottleneck is the CPU, not the GPU — the emulated Xbox CPU thread sits at 85-97% load while the GPU is mostly idle. That spare graphics headroom means you can raise the internal resolution by 4x at almost no performance cost.
There are caveats beyond speed. You’ll need to supply your own Xbox BIOS, MCPX boot ROM, hard disk image and games as XISO files, since discs aren’t supported. Save states are missing, audio DSP emulation is off by default because it hurts performance, and frame generation through an FSR 3 port is on the roadmap rather than in the build.
The PS5 Homebrew Scene Keeps Accelerating
XPSemu lands about a week after ProsperoEden brought Nintendo Switch games to jailbroken PS5s, and shortly after the Relapse exploit unlocked nearly every PS5 model. The PS5’s own emulation scene is moving fast too — the KytyPS5 emulator booted Marvel’s Wolverine at 20 FPS just days after its first successful boot. With the door open this wide, more ports like XPSemu are probably on the way.