Modern Vintage Gamer has published a new video examining the current state of PS5 emulation, concluding that while recent progress marks an important milestone, fully playable commercial games remain years away.
The video focuses on two publicly available PlayStation 5 emulators, Sharp MU and KyTy, which have both reached the point where they can boot commercial PS5 games in limited scenarios. According to the YouTuber, reports suggesting PS5 games are already playable are misleading, as both projects remain in a very early stage of development.
Sharp MU, which is being developed from scratch, can now load retail PS5 executables, execute native CPU instructions, partially emulate kernel functions, and produce video output in some cases. Some games are also reaching portions of the console’s graphics pipeline. However, key features, including additional CPU instruction support, system module loading, complete kernel functionality and game metadata handling, are still missing.
As a result, commercial games make only limited progress. Demon’s Souls reaches its title image before eventually displaying an SCE screen after roughly 30 minutes, then crashes shortly afterwards. Astro Bot also boots to its title image but fails to progress further in the main development branch, although experimental builds have rendered slightly more content without becoming playable.
The video also highlights recent progress in KyTy, a PS5 emulator first introduced in 2022. While it initially supported only homebrew software, recent updates have enabled several commercial titles to boot, including Disgaea 6, Dreaming Sarah, Minecraft Legends, Silent Hill: The Short Message and Shadow of the Ninja. Reports also suggest Grand Theft Auto V can reach loading screens and some menu functionality.
Despite these improvements, Modern Vintage Gamer stresses that neither emulator offers functional gameplay. Current limitations include missing graphics, broken controller input, no audio support, frequent crashes, corrupted save data and extremely poor performance that can be measured in seconds per frame.
The video notes that important technical foundations are now beginning to work, including executable loading, kernel functions, memory mapping, graphics command processing and early shader recompilation. These are described as significant milestones for the long-term development of PS5 emulation, even if they do not yet translate into playable games.
Looking ahead, Modern Vintage Gamer says practical PS5 emulation is still “months and months and months of work, if not years away.” The video later adds that fully playable games from start to finish could take “many, many months” and “maybe several years,” drawing comparisons with PS4 emulation, which took around four years to mature from early proof-of-concept projects into modern emulators capable of running demanding titles such as Bloodborne.
