Xemu, a popular emulator for the original Xbox, has been ported to jailbroken PlayStation 5 consoles. The project, called XPSemu, was posted by modder ZiZc3 on GitHub after a video showed it running Forza Motorsport, Halo 2, and Crash Bandicoot. ZiZc3 says the port is essentially unchanged Xemu; the main work was making it open as a PS5 application and adding PS5-specific touches such as a controller-friendly dashboard, per-game settings, cover art, play time, game patches, and a performance overlay.
Under the hood, Xemu uses QEMU's TCG JIT to translate Xbox CPU instructions in real time, and it has its own translation for the Xbox's NV2A GPU with a Vulkan renderer. On PS5, it talks to the AMD GPU through the RADV Vulkan driver via the PS5_Vulkan project, which allowed the porter to run it as a native application.
Performance varies in the developer's tests. Halo 2 runs at a solid 30 FPS stock, and with a 60 FPS patch it hits 51-60 FPS in the opening and 36-50 FPS in gameplay. Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex runs smoothly. Fable: The Lost Chapters is mostly 22-30 FPS but drops in heavy areas, and Forza Motorsport falls to 15-21 FPS while racing. ZiZc3 attributes the bottleneck to the emulated Xbox CPU, which is loaded at 85-97% while the PS5 GPU remains mostly idle, so resolution scaling up to 3-4x has little performance impact.
XPSemu is available for testing, but ZiZc3 cautions that not every game will work properly at this stage. The port arrives as emulators on jailbroken PS5s continue to multiply, including a recently announced Xbox 360 project and a PS5 Proton project, even as the console's count of fully exclusive games remains below 15.