Astro Bot is running at 60 frames per second on a PC. No PlayStation 5 involved, no official port, no help from Sony.
That’s where PS5 emulation stands right now, and it got there fast. For years, if you played on PC and wanted a PlayStation 5 game, you waited for the publisher to pay for a custom port. Sony has recently said it will be scaling those back. Meanwhile, a handful of emulators and porting tools are making recent PlayStation titles more and more playable on ordinary PCs.
SharpEmu went from alpha to Demon’s Souls in months
SharpEmu was the first PS5 emulator out of the gate. In May, it was in a “very early alpha stage.” Now it can “load the eboot.bin of real games, execute native CPU instructions, and partially handle GPU-related functionality.”
The latest release lists 10 tested games that reach a “playable” state. Developer CursedIfElse said six of them are “fully playable at 60 fps.” Some are simple 2D games like Tetris Forever. But the list also includes 3D games like Astro Bot and the PS5 Demon’s Souls remaster, both running at playable frame rates.
“SharpEmu has prioritized hardware accuracy from the very beginning, and we’re finally starting to see that investment pay off,” CursedIfElse said on social media this week. “It was built completely from scratch, and this is how far we’ve come.”
KytyPS5 showed up with a long list
SharpEmu isn’t alone anymore. KytyPS5 put out its first public version last week, a major expansion of the PS4-focused emulator Kyty. Its GitHub page said it “can boot 2D games and a selection of 3D games, including titles built with Unreal Engine 4/5, Unity, and custom engines.”
Its compatibility list is already long. It shows 134 titles with “controllable gameplay,” though plenty of those still come with reports of persistent, game-breaking bugs. (Controllable and finishable are two different things.)
And you can already find YouTube footage of Astro’s Playroom and Demon’s Souls running quite capably on it.
The strangest approach might be the most interesting one
AnyPS5 doesn’t try to emulate the whole console. It calls itself a “tool for automatic executables porting,” and it works kind of like Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit. It takes a PS5 game’s original x86 code and relinks it directly to native executable instructions a PC can run.
That puts it in an odd middle ground. It’s more hands-off than static decompilation of a game’s source code, and lighter than recreating the entire PS5 environment.
It’s early. Its developers said about 76 percent of system libraries and 50 percent of GPU shader instructions are fully supported. That’s enough to get simple games like Dreaming Sarah to a “playable state.” It’s also produced proof-of-concept footage of the PS5 edition of Dead Cells running as a native PC executable.
Don’t sell your console yet
A solid majority of the PS5 library running well on PC hardware is probably still a long way off. Bugs, partial GPU support and short compatibility lists are the reality today.
But three separate projects moved this much in one stretch. Five months ago SharpEmu was an alpha. This week its developer posted Astro Bot at 60 fps and wrote, “this is how far we’ve come.”
