You can finally just plug your PS2 and PS3 discs into a PS5 and play your classic games on the modern console – just without Sony's permission. A recent PS5 jailbreak has opened the door for community developers to put robust emulators for classic consoles on the platform, and it's gone to show that we could've had proper backwards compatibility with the old consoles on PS5 all along.
There've been all kinds of wild homebrew developments since the big PS5 jailbreak debuted a few weeks ago, but if you're not interested in piracy, the addition of emulators is certainly the most intriguing. PS5SX2 is a port of the ubiquitous PS2 emulator for PC, PCSX2, and does exactly what it says on the tin. It lets you play PS2 games on your PS5.
You'll want to know this part up front: Claude is listed as the largest contributor to this port of the emulator, so this is – exhaustingly – another example of vibe coding's effect on the retro scene. But, personally, I'm more interested in the mere fact that you can even directly insert your old PS2 discs into your PS5's disc drive, and the emulator will read them. Testing from MVG suggests that there may be some stutters when running the games directly off the disc, but you can also install the game to your hard drive and get a smoother experience.
RPCS3-5 is, similarly, a port of RPCS3 that lets you run PS3 games on PS5 using original discs in the standard console disc drive. Don't expect miracles on this side, as PS3 emulation can be a struggle even on high-end PCs, but the fact that we can have these games running at all on the modern platform is still a minor miracle.
Previous PS5 jailbreaks already allowed PS2 games to be played on the platform, but the earlier solutions required each game to be packaged together using a hacked version of Sony's official emulator. You didn't have the freedom to just insert a PS2 disc into the PS5 drive and play it like a normal backwards compatible game.
And, yes, there are now PS1 emulators for jailbroken PS5s, too. But the laser in a proper PS5 disc drive will only read DVDs and Blu-rays – there's no CD laser to read PS1 discs. This also means that a handful of CD-based PS2 games are also not supported. But even then, there's a solution: just grab one of the plentiful and inexpensive USB disc drives available online and plug that into your PS5. Boom, PS1 support added.
So now comes the obvious question: why didn't Sony let us play PS2 games on PS5 in the first place? The disc drive natively supports these DVDs. The company built its own PS2 emulator to power various games on the PlayStation Store. Have we really been locked out of this feature for all these years purely because Sony would rather have us permanently subscribed to PS Plus and its library of old games?
It's tough to come up with a read on this that's not extremely cynical but, well, Sony's made it pretty easy to assume the worst this generation. With the end of PlayStation discs looming, analysts suggest that Sony's real aim is to gather full control of an all-digital marketplace for games. I suspect that support for PS1, PS2, and PS3 discs – all of which are parts of used markets that Sony sees no profits from – isn't especially compelling for the people making the publisher's business calls.
I'll take any excuse I can get to check out the best PS2 games of all time.
