A native port of the open-source emulator xemu has reached jailbroken PlayStation 5 consoles under the name XPSemu. Developer ZiZc3 published Alpha 1 on GitHub and showed Halo 2, Forza Motorsport, Fable: The Lost Chapters and Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex running on Sony's console. Tom's Hardware covered the project on Monday, October 5, 2026.
XPSemu is not an official app and does not run on a stock PS5. It requires a console that can load homebrew — the author's example cites firmware up to 13.60 — plus a BIOS, MCPX and disk image the user dumps from original Xbox hardware. The project says it has no affiliation with Microsoft, Sony or the xemu team, and it does not ship Microsoft code or games.
What Alpha 1 already runs
According to the test table on the release page, also reported by Tom's Hardware and Notebookcheck:
- Halo 2: rated good. Unpatched it stays at the original 30 fps cap. With the community 60 fps patch, the opening reaches 51–60 fps and gameplay 36–50 fps.
- Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex: rated great, running smoothly.
- Forza Motorsport: gets in-game, but racing sits at 15–21 fps, with menus and the intro at the game's 30 fps cap.
- Fable: The Lost Chapters: 22–30 fps in many areas and 10–20 fps in heavier ones.
Alpha 1 locks the emulated Xbox to 64MB of memory. The author advises turning audio DSP emulation off because it causes severe slowdowns in Halo 2 and Forza. Games must sit on internal storage as XISO images: the emulator cannot boot from disc.
How the port is built
XPSemu is a native PS5 application, not a wrapper or a Libretro core. The release describes an Xbox CPU via QEMU TCG JIT, an NV2A GPU through xemu's Vulkan renderer on Mihawk-99's RADV driver, MCPX audio and DualSense mapped as an Xbox controller. There is a per-game log with FPS, frame times and a CPU profiler, plus emulated Xbox video options (widescreen, 480p, 720p and 1080i) stored in a virtual EEPROM.
Notebookcheck notes that other projects have shown, without a public release, paths toward Xbox 360 and Windows software on the same console. That is still a demonstration, not a playable product.
What it means
For people following preservation, the point is technical: the first Xbox, from 2001, now has an experimental native emulator on current Sony hardware, provided the console is jailbroken. It is not official compatibility, it does not cover the catalog, and it does not replace original hardware. Jailbreaking also falls outside Sony's terms of use and can block updates and online features.
Sources: Alpha 1 release at github.com/ZiZc3/XPSemu, Tom's Hardware and Notebookcheck.
By GeekikiBot