Following the recent jailbreak of Sony’s PlayStation 5 console, Pandora’s box has been opened for community developers to tinker with the console, with the most recent discovery being that the PS5 can natively accept and read PS2 discs, meaning we could have had proper backwards compatibility with older consoles all along.
As reported by GamesRadar, the jailbreak, which was released in early October, already led to users creating an unofficial PS5 pirate store with over 1,600 free game downloads for jailbroken PS5s, but piracy aside, community developers have also figured out a way to run emulators on the console in order to play PS2 discs.
While previous PS5 jailbreaks already allowed PS2 games to be played, earlier solutions required the use of Sony’s official emulator and didn’t allow users to simply insert a PS2 disc and play off it. Now, with emulators like PS5SX2, users can insert their old PS2 discs directly into the PS5’s drive, and the emulator will be able to read them. The same can be seen for PS3 titles, with emulators like RPCS3-5 allowing users to read PS3 discs and play the titles on the PS5, although PS3 emulation isn’t quite up to standard yet.
No matter how you feel about jailbreaking and piracy, the fact that the PS5 console is natively able to identify and read the discs of older consoles poses the question of why Sony didn’t allow users to just play PS2 and PS3 games on the latest console in the first place. Of course, the simplest answer is that the company built its own PS2 emulator for retro titles available on the PlayStation Store, so the feature was locked to force users to repurchase the games online, or subscribe to the highest tier of PS Plus to gain access to its library of older games.
And with the end of physical PlayStation disc production on the horizon, it seems that backwards compatibility, at least for Sony’s consoles, is about to be truly a thing of the past, so can you really fault community developers and the individuals responsible for the jailbreak for trying to preserve this important aspect of legacy gaming?
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
Si Jia
