Watch a YouTuber Emulate PlayStation 5 Games on an Xbox Series X
He told CNET he wanted to see if those games could play on the hardware, so he worked it out.
The ultimate console crossover just went from a gamer’s pipe dream to reality. Modder Devran “Cosmo” Uenal recently posted a video on YouTube in which he plays a PlayStation 5 emulator on an Xbox Series X. He told CNET in a message that he wanted to see if he could get those games to play on the Xbox hardware.
“There was only one way to find out, so I did it,” he wrote.
Uenal said in the video that he ran an experimental Xbox port of the open-source PlayStation 5 emulator KytyPS5. That emulator — which is itself a heavily modified version of another emulator — is meant to be run on PC, so getting it to run on Xbox took some effort.
Uenal wrote that to make this project easier, he looked for less demanding games to run in the emulator. In the video, he has the option to play PlayStation 5 versions of Gex Trilogy, Hellboy Web of Wyrd, Marvel Cosmic Invasion and Quake 2 on an Xbox Series X. He ultimately boots up Quake 2 in the video.
“Quake 2 piqued my interest,” he wrote to CNET. “It’s a game I played almost 30 years ago on much older hardware, so I knew it would be a good candidate for testing.”
Quake 2 runs at 20 to 40 frames per second for most of Uenal’s video, with a few significant stutters. After watching this video, I booted up Quake 2 on Xbox Game Pass’s cloud streaming and didn’t experience lag or other issues. However, it’s still impressive that Uenal could get the PlayStation 5 version of that game to work on Xbox hardware.
“I hear ‘that’s impossible’ a lot, but for me that’s just fuel for motivation,” Uenal told CNET.
Representatives for Xbox and PlayStation didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
In another video, Uenal shows the PlayStation 5 user interface screen running on an Xbox, and you can see the option to play the PlayStation version of Grand Theft Auto 5.
According to tech and gaming website BGR, GTA 5 is “surprisingly playable” on the PC version of KytyPS5, so we could see a video in the future of Uenal playing a PlayStation version of GTA 5 on an Xbox. We might even get that before Rockstar releases Grand Theft Auto 6.
Emulators are software that can mimic other hardware. In this case, the software allows you to play PlayStation 5 games on Xbox. According to Indiana law firm McNeely Law, emulators themselves aren’t illegal. However, their potential for playing pirated games raises legal concerns.
“It may be legal in certain, limited circumstances for a gamer to re-create a game they have purchased into a file playable by their emulator, it is generally illegal to share or download any video game files for use via emulator,” the law firm wrote online.
Because emulators fall into a legal gray area, I don’t recommend using them. Don’t get yourself in trouble just to play a nearly 30-year-old game like Quake 2.
