Jailbroken PS5: Native EglantinePS5 Port Boots Switch 2 Exclusives on OrbisOS
We told you to keep a close eye on this repository last Saturday: in our deep dive covering the first public PC releases of the Eden-NX2 and Eglantine Nintendo Switch 2 emulators, we explicitly highlighted the quiet emergence of a dedicated PlayStation 5 port on GitHub. Less than a week later, that codebase has turned into a working reality, allowing a jailbroken PS5 to boot and run Nintendo Switch 2 exclusives including Pokémon Pokopia and Mario Kart World.
EglantinePS5 Brings Native Nintendo Switch 2 Emulation to OrbisOS Through Mihawk-99's PS5 Mesa Vulkan Driver
Spearheaded by homebrew developer heydemoura (also known as AngelXex), the newly released alpha build v1.000.000 is available right now on the official EglantinePS5 GitHub repository. Built upon the PS5 Payload SDK by John Törnblom and the ProsperoEden native application framework, the project merges the latest Eglantine codebase with the 145 architectural fixes engineered by Takoroka in Eden-NX2.
Owners of a modified PlayStation 5 running an exploitable system software version up to firmware 13.60 now have two distinct pathways to experiment with Nintendo Switch 2 software on Sony's hardware:
- Native Execution on OrbisOS via EglantinePS5: running directly from the PS5 home screen without booting into an external operating system, the emulator defaults to a hardware-accelerated Vulkan backend powered by the open-source RADV PS5 Mesa driver maintained by mihawk-99 (alongside an optional OpenGL fallback via
ps5-opengl). This layer translates Switch 2 graphics calls directly for the console's custom AMD RDNA 2 GPU while supporting on-console shader caching. - Running the Linux Builds Through Bazzite on PS5: alternatively, users can bypass OrbisOS altogether. As detailed in our coverage of the Bazzite Linux PS5 image unlocking 40 GPU compute units, booting Linux on a jailbroken console makes it possible to launch the standard Linux builds of Eden-NX2 or Eglantine with full RDNA 2 desktop acceleration.
Despite its early alpha label, the native EglantinePS5 launcher already packs an ambitious feature set tailored for living-room displays: internal resolution scaling from 0.5x to 4x paired with AMD FSR upscaling, output modes up to 2160p (4K) at 120 Hz, per-game switching between Switch 2 Docked and Handheld profiles, full DualSense button remapping, local network RomM server integration, and even an experimental frame generation toggle (ported by gyn7561) designed to interpolate 30 FPS titles up to 60 FPS.
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Pokémon Pokopia and Mario Kart World in Action: An Alpha Proof of Concept Held Back by NVN2 GPU Translation
Having Pokémon Pokopia and Mario Kart World render in-game on a PlayStation 5 is a remarkable technical milestone, yet the actual gameplay experience remains strictly in proof-of-concept territory. Because EglantinePS5 shares its core emulation engine with the PC builds of Eglantine, it inherits the exact same bottlenecks when translating the Nintendo Switch 2's proprietary Nvidia Ampere NVN2 graphics pipeline.
In current builds, both titles exhibit heavy shader compilation stutter, missing surface textures, broken lighting passes, and darkened character silhouettes caused by unimplemented mesh shaders and 64-bit GPU instructions. Furthermore, the emulator does not include any proprietary firmware or cryptographic keys, and it cannot read encrypted commercial cartridges: users must supply their own decrypted ExeFS and RomFS game directories dumped from a Switch 2 on firmware 23.0.1 or lower via the ns2jb userland chain and OunceCake.
My Perspective
Watching a PlayStation 5 boot Nintendo Switch 2 exclusives less than a week after the first public PC build of Eden-NX2 went live is one of the wildest crossover moments the homebrew scene has delivered in years. When I first pointed out the heydemoura/EglantinePS5 repository in our report last Saturday, it was easy to wonder whether the Switch 2 branch would actually survive the jump to Sony's proprietary OrbisOS environment. Having Pokémon Pokopia and Mario Kart World reach active gameplay proves just how mature the PS5 homebrew graphics stack, and specifically mihawk-99's RADV Mesa driver, has become.
Let's be realistic, though: nobody is replacing an actual Nintendo Switch 2 with a jailbroken PS5 today given the severe visual glitches, shader stutters, and complex decrypted dump requirements. Still, the architectural bridge is now standing, meaning every upstream breakthrough made on PC for Nintendo's Ampere GPU will trickle down almost immediately to Sony's living-room console.
Based on the outskirts of New York City, Chaya 'Chayane' spent five years studying software engineering in Montreal before returning to her home state. A Full-Stack developer and Deep Learning AI architecture researcher, she explores neural networks and algorithmic optimization while engineering data pipelines for Retrocharting and Gamescharting alongside Grimtag. A gamer for over 20 years and an avid collector of Nintendo history and The Legend of Zelda, she explored World of Warcraft's Azeroth before bringing her deep technical background to video game analysis.
