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The story
An emulator capable of running PS5 games has reportedly gotten working on an actual Xbox Series X console, sparking a stir on 5ch’s Hardware/Industry (“Geha”) board. On PC, reports say the frame rate for the Demon’s Souls Remake emulation jumped dramatically within just a week, drawing attention to how fast development is moving. Some in the thread argued that backlash over Sony’s reported plan last month to phase out the PS5’s disc drive helped fuel the emulator’s development, while others pushed back hard against posts that seemed to justify pirating games, leaving the thread divided.
What people said
Who on earth would even want to play that garbage!
・PS5 has no must-play exclusives, so nobody bothers building an emulator
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Sony pisses everyone off by killing the disc drive, so spite-driven devs start building one
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Turns out it's easy to emulate, up and running within months
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Now it's ported to Xbox too ← we are here
LOL, turns out 'nothing worth playing' was the ultimate defense system.
Might feel like ancient history, but the disc-drive announcement was literally just last month.
LOL the tiny software library was basically the anti-piracy measure.
Pretty sure the master key leaked because of a screwup on Sony's own end in the first place… though I don't know the details.
No idea about the Xbox version, but on PC, Demon's Souls is apparently already running stably.
It's less a 'hack' on Xbox and more that applying as an indie developer unlocks a dev/test mode.
Re: #27
Right, that's exactly why nobody ever bothered making one — but once the disc-drive backlash got people building it out of spite, it came together shockingly fast.
Still, glad to see progress since GTA6 is coming late to PC.
Building an emulator just for those sounds pointless.
If anything the PS5's specs are on the weak side…
Sony's brand imaging really is something else — PlayStation has never actually had top-tier specs, not even once.
Last week people were saying Demon's Souls on PC ran at like 2-3fps — has it improved more since then?
It hit 30fps within a week 😤
30fps is basically the same as running on the actual console.
That's a huge leap. Feels like 60fps is both close and still far off, though.
Cemu runs on it too. Xbox is the only place you can play literally every Nintendo game.
There are so few exclusives that devs only need to optimize for a handful of titles — must be the easiest emulator ever to build (lol)
That's the PC version you're talking about.
LOL, now that you mention it, they only need to specialize for a handful of games lol
Series X is wild.
If 'an emulator exists' were enough to hurt console sales, Nintendo would've quit the hardware business ages ago.
What is this guy even saying? I'm just saying if you can emulate PS5 on Xbox, you don't need a PS5.
It's actually the opposite — demand goes up in China and it ends up selling more because of it. The Switch is a perfect example. Though for some reason crappy Xbox can emulate almost every game out there and still doesn't sell lol
Re: #77
I think it means the games stop selling. Save the self-own for somewhere else.
What do you mean? Like, downloading games illegally?
So basically you're saying Xbox users are criminals.
So you're justifying a crime just because you hate Sony?
LOL, spoken like a true criminal apologist — you really do think differently.
Background and Key Points of the Debate
Commenters in the thread point to backlash against Sony’s recently announced plan to discontinue the PS5’s disc drive as the trigger behind the emulator’s sudden progress. Console emulators typically take years to develop because of the work involved in cracking encryption keys and reverse-engineering internal architecture, but posters noted that the PS5’s thin exclusive lineup had inadvertently kept developer interest away, functioning as a kind of unintentional “countermeasure.” Toward the end of the thread, however, opinion split between posts defending illegal copying of games and others condemning that stance as “justifying a crime” — a reminder that praise for the emulator’s technical achievement can easily get tangled up with the separate issue of copyright infringement. The reports of it running are a technical story in their own right, but actually playing PS5 games this way still carries legal risk depending on how the files were obtained.
※This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Hardware/Industry, “Geha”) thread “[Sad News] PS5 Emulator Ends Up Running on Xbox Series X 😄”.
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