Behold, my dear readers, the most stubborn console of its generation: while Sony closes holes every two weeks, the PS5 homebrew community has turned the machine into a box that runs almost anything. According to Android Authority, a jailbroken PS5 now runs Android games without Linux, plays PC games through two launchers and has even received an experimental Switch 2 emulator port, the same front we covered earlier this month with Pokémon Pokopia. The detail that changes everything: none of it works on an updated console.
Hydroid: Android without Android
The real news is Hydroid, an open-source project (GPL-3.0 licence) by developer ZiZc3, published on GitHub. Instead of booting a full Linux system or a virtual machine, it loads the game’s own ARM64 libraries, translates the code to x86-64 as it runs with a dynamic recompiler (dynarmic) and answers, function by function, the calls the game would make to Android: the C library, the kernel, graphics, audio, DualSense input and storage. There is no Android image underneath.
The numbers, my friends, are deliciously concrete: Subway Surfers, Geometry Dash Lite, Crossy Road, Sonic Dash, Sonic Boom, Shadow Fight 2, Jetpack Joyride, Temple Run 2, Fruit Ninja and Cut the Rope are listed as “playable” on the project’s official page, and the Infinity Blade trilogy has a separate port. Only 64-bit (arm64) games run, and engines such as Unity, Cocos2d-x, Godot and Unreal are already supported. The Hydroid packages do not include the games: the user has to supply their own copy of each one. Phone games made for portrait mode stay portrait, in a “phone screen” in the middle of the TV.
PC and Switch 2 games, with asterisks
On the PC front, two launchers have matured: Playden signs into the user’s Steam account to install and manage games with home-screen tiles and cloud save sync, while PC5 installs offline PC games from an exFAT USB drive, with adaptive-trigger support. Both use a native Wine stack on the console. EglantinePS5, meanwhile, is an experimental alpha port of an emulator forked from Eden with early scaffolding for the Switch 2: it promises up to 4x resolution scaling, DualSense rumble and motion, and Reddit reports say Pokopia works while Mario Kart World and Splatoon Raiders do not.
The price of the feat
In practice, this means: everything requires a jailbroken PS5 on firmware 13.60 or lower, flaws Sony has already patched; PSN requires at least 14.10 to sign in, and GTA 6 is expected to require 14.22, as we explained in our coverage of the latest PS5 security update. Anyone who tampers with the console risks an account and console ban, loss of warranty, being stuck on old firmware, and fake files carrying malware under these projects’ names. SavePoint reports that this exists, but does not point to where to download it or how to do it.
The legal path stays simple: the mobile games are on the Android and iOS stores, the PC games on Steam, and the Switch 2 is the only official home for Pokopia and Mario Kart World. And anyone who enjoys engineering on the right side of the law will find plenty of projects in our guide to games ported to the browser and PC. The world is not ready for a PS5 running Subway Surfers… and I love it.
Where to buy: PlayStation 5 on Amazon
Sources: Android Authority and Hydroid.
Lady Combo
