A native Nintendo Switch emulator is running on jailbroken PS5s

Homebrew developer BlackBearReloaded has released ProsperoEden, an alpha Nintendo Switch emulator that runs natively on jailbroken PlayStation 5 consoles. According to Videocardz, the software bypasses the need for an intermediate Linux operating system and executes Switch code directly within Sony's native environment.

The initial v1.000.010 build shows promising results for 2D titles. Studio MDHR's 2017 platformer Cuphead runs at a locked 60 frames per second. Cuphead is built entirely on traditional hand-drawn cel animation, meaning it demands precise 2D rendering rather than heavy 3D geometry processing. I am curious how much headroom the PS5 actually has for heavier 2D games, but this is a solid baseline. More demanding 3D games are struggling. Metroid Dread hovers around 40 frames per second. Super Mario 3D World and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe successfully boot into gameplay, but they are not running at full speed.

Stuck on OpenGL for now

The performance bottleneck comes down to the rendering API. ProsperoEden currently relies on an OpenGL translation pipeline on the PS5 side. Support for Vulkan is still in development. Without Vulkan, complex 3D titles face severe slowdowns and instability. The source notes that games like Pokémon Legends: Z-A are practically unplayable in this state.

The Switch itself is powered by an Nvidia Tegra X1 system-on-chip, which relies heavily on modern API features for its graphical output. Translating those calls through OpenGL on AMD hardware is inherently inefficient.

ProsperoEden is a native port of Eden, which itself is a community fork derived from the open-source Yuzu project. Yuzu was discontinued in March 2024 following a high-profile legal settlement with Nintendo. The community has spent the last two years splintering that codebase into various continuation projects. Getting one of those forks to run as a native PS5 application is a massive technical leap. Most of the development effort since the Yuzu shutdown has focused on PC and Android builds.

Skipping the Linux boot

Previous console emulation workflows on the PS5 required users to boot an entire Linux distribution on exploited hardware just to launch desktop emulators. That process is tedious, and it's rarely stable. You have to partition storage, load a payload, boot into a separate operating system, and then run a Linux-compiled emulator. ProsperoEden skips all of that. It runs directly as a PS5 application within Sony's native operating system.

The PS5 hardware features a custom AMD Zen 2 processor and RDNA 2 graphics. That is more than enough raw power to brute-force Switch emulation, provided the software layer is optimized.

Cuphead is already available natively on PlayStation consoles. It was ported to the PS4 in July 2020. You don't actually need a Switch emulator to fight King Dice on a PS5. The value here is the proof of concept. A jailbroken PS5 is already a capable machine for running PlayStation 4 backups and older retro emulators. If BlackBearReloaded implements a proper Vulkan backend, Sony's current-generation console could become a highly capable Switch emulation box as well.