News from the IT community on October 4th: According to a report by VideoCardz today, XPSemu has ported the open-source first-generation Xbox emulator xemu to PS5, allowing some of the first-generation Xbox games to be run on host computers. Meanwhile, projects that simulate Xbox on 360 and those that run Windows games based on Wine / Proton are also in the development or demonstration phase.

IT Note: XPSemu is a ported version of xemu designed for PS5, with adaptations made for the host hardware. This project utilizes QEMU's TCG JIT to handle Xbox CPU simulation, and performs graphic rendering through xemu's Vulkan backend as well as the open-source RADV drivers available for PS5. It should be noted that this simulation represents the original Xbox released in 2001, not the Xbox 360 model.

Currently, XPSemu Alpha 1 has been made public, allowing for the launch of some games. It also provides features similar to Xbox, such as a dedicated game settings interface, patches, performance monitoring, and the ability to adjust the internal rendering resolution from 1 to 4 times.

Test data released by developers shows that "Halo 2" runs at approximately 30 FPS by default, and after applying the 60 FPS patch, it runs at around 36 to 50 FPS during actual gameplay; "Contra: Rage of the Furry Ones" can run smoothly; during "Gran Turismo" races, it runs at about 15 to 21 FPS; in "Fable: The Lost Chapters," most scenes run at 22 to 30 FPS, but under high-load conditions, it drops to 10 to 20 FPS.

From the current tests, it appears that the main performance bottleneck of XPSemu is not GPU. Developers indicate that the thread responsible for simulating Xbox CPU may be consuming 85% to 97% of the CPU time allocated to it, while GPU remains in a low-load state for most of the time. Therefore, increasing the internal rendering resolution by 3 or 4 times in some games does not have a significant impact on overall performance.

Apart from the first-generation Xbox, the Xbox 360 simulation has also appeared in developer demonstrations. Developer BrinoBlitz showcased a video on October 3rd showing an early version of the Xbox 360 simulator running on PS5, and indicated that the project will be released after fixing the remaining issues. Currently, there is no public version or game compatibility list for this project, so its development progress is still significantly ahead of that of XPSemu, which already provides Alpha 1.

On the other hand, a project named PP (which is related to PS5 Proton) is attempting to bring Proton to the stage of cracking PS5, allowing the host to run Windows games directly without the need to install Linux on PS5 first. The developers have publicly demonstrated the relevant functionality and stated that this project is based on the porting work of Wine. However, as of now, no public version or code repository has been provided, so the specific game compatibility and actual performance remain to be confirmed.

Currently, XPSemu already has a public version, a code repository, and some game test data, while Xbox emulator and PS5 Proton are still in the development or demonstration stage. Recently, the development speed of PS5 cracking and related Homebrew projects has significantly accelerated. In addition to traditional emulators, compatibility layer solutions for Windows software and games have also begun to emerge.

It should be noted that the cracking capability of PS5 is closely related to the system firmware version. Sony released the PS5 system software version 26.06-14.10.00 on October 1st. The official statement includes fixes for security issues in the system software, as well as improvements to its performance and stability, and it is not merely a performance optimization update (the recently released PS5 and Relapse jailbreak methods currently support up to version 13.60).

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