A jailbroken PlayStation 5 can now run original Xbox games, which is quite ironic, to say the least. Developer ZiZc3 has published XPSemu Alpha 1 on GitHub, a port of the open-source xemu emulator that runs as a native PS5 app. In the developer's own testing, an unmodified Halo 2 holds 30 FPS on average. With the community 60 FPS patch, it apparently reaches 51 to 60 FPS in the opening and 36 to 50 FPS during gameplay. Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex is said to run smoothly as well. The other results, however, are less impressive. Forza Motorsport drops to 15 to 21 FPS in races, and Fable: The Lost Chapters falls to 10 to 20 FPS in heavy scenes. It looks like the CPU is the limit here.

ZiZc3 says the emulated Xbox CPU thread stays at 85 to 97% load while the GPU sits mostly idle. That spare headroom lets you raise the internal resolution by 4x at almost no cost. You'll need your own Xbox BIOS, MCPX boot ROM, hard disk image, and games as XISO files, since discs aren't supported. Save states are missing, and audio DSP emulation is off by default because it hurts performance. Frame generation through an FSR 3 port is on the roadmap. XPSemu comes about a week after ProsperoEden brought Switch games to jailbroken PS5s and the Relapse exploit unlocked nearly every PS5 model, so more ports like this are probably on the way.