This summer, Sony announced the abandonment of PlayStation game discs. This not only gave a new impetus to the development of various PlayStation 5 console emulators, but also to another direction — the native launch of console games on PC.
Recently, a tech enthusiast under the nickname boykopovar spoke about the “AnyPS5” project. It aims to execute PlayStation 5 binary files in the Linux operating system, as well as Windows.
Traditional emulators require significant hardware resources to virtualize the console's architecture, while boykopovar's proposed solution for native launch is an executable file converter and a compatibility layer:
According to the concept, the program takes original PlayStation 5 ELF files and then, with the help of a converter, they should adapt to the architecture of modern PCs.
boykopovar opened the “AnyPS5” repository on GitHub. In the description, he clarified that the project uses only the standard C++20 library and “performs deterministic transformation of the executable binary file” (converts console data into native executable files). Work is also underway to create a replacement for system dynamic PRX libraries. Currently, the tool is able to reach the main game rendering loop. However, execution currently stops at the first rendering stage.