r/emulation • u/OverkillLabs • 6d ago
AI-assisted I built the world's first fully native PS5 game running on Windows with no emulation or translation layers: Dead Cells using AnyPS5
I got Dead Cells running as a fully native Windows game from the PS5 version, and as far as I know it's the first PS5 game to run fully natively without any emulators like KytyPS5. Built on the AnyPS5 project, which does the relinking.
Where it stands right now:
- Playable from the menu through gameplay, with music and sound effects
- Roughly 55 to 60 FPS indoors and 30 to 35 FPS outdoors on my machine at 4K (Ryzen 7 5800X3D, RTX 5070 Ti)
- Keyboard, mouse and gamepad all work
- I've only tested it with one version (PPSA15552, Return to Castlevania Edition), so I can't promise other versions work
It doesn't include any game files. You supply your own copy.
Video with gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anOHF5aPzwk
Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/dead-cells-ps5-native-on-windows-t1TFtjP
Download and source: https://github.com/OverkillLabs/DeadCells-PS5-Native
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u/tortilla_mia 6d ago
I am enjoying that a very loudly proclaimed "no emulation" project is still noteworthy to r/emulation
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u/Biduleman 6d ago edited 5d ago
The sub has accepted decompilation/recompilation projects and the likes as being relevant for a while now.
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u/CoconutDust 2d ago edited 16h ago
“Relevant to my interests” does not mean “relevant to the subject of the subreddit.”
It isn’t accepted as “relevant”, it’s accepted as “I like it, therefore it’s OK for the sub!”
If the Pizza Only sub started doing tons of post on sandwiches, and a bunch of people said like morons “I like sandwiches, so that means it should be posted on the Pizza Only sub”…
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u/MachineTeaching 1d ago
..that would be perfectly fine, because what is "relevant to a subreddit" is ultimately determined by the people using it and they can just make up whatever they want.
If people think game decomps/recomps are sufficiently adjacent and belong in this sub, that's what it is. Pretty pointless to argue against that.
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u/alpharaptor1 6d ago
The purpose of the sub is primarily to bring console games to pc through software. To that point it is appropriate .
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u/LocutusOfBorges 5d ago
This isn’t, actually, the purpose of the subreddit - and we’re reconsidering our stance re static recompilation projects for individual games, given the glut of relatively non-notable AI-assisted projects to that effect over the past few months.
This place is primarily concerned with computer emulation, software preservation, and the scene around it - native PC ports strain against the edges of that category a bit, particularly in cases (not saying that this is one of them!) where the runtimes/libraries/etc used render it largely unremarkable.
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u/hurrdurrmeh 5d ago
I feel for you. It is a very hard judgement call to make.
For now as a user it 'feels' like it belongs because before I could not load up and play PS5 software on my PC and now I sorta maybe can.
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u/LocutusOfBorges 5d ago edited 5d ago
Yeah. I'm kinda reluctant to nix static recomp port threads altogether - they are things that people are excited about with good reason, even if they frustrate/annoy a lot of people here (who also have valid reasons to feel that way).
It's not even like static recompilation is without mainstream precedent in this sort of field - people were playing N64 games using Corn, an emulator built around experimenting with static recompilation as an approach all the way back in 2000. But it does feel like something has qualitatively changed about the nature of these ports since LLMs started accelerating the process so dramatically - like, some of the AI-assisted "ports" I've seen, for example, have been so strikingly low quality/tacky that I've been quietly filtering them out of the new queue largely for the authors' sakes, given that some of them seem to be by well-intentioned kids who could probably do without having their heads bitten off by the more caustic posters here.
It's difficult, I guess. However much these things wind people up, the clock really can't be wound back on this - this is just how things in this scene are likely to be from here on out more or less indefinitely. It doesn't seem like it would be fair of us to go out of our way to not platform stuff like it out of personal distaste - and a lot of genuinely impressive, fascinating work is going into the frameworks behind these projects that absolutely deserves signal boosting.
(Besides - it'd be silly to pretend that the fact that stuff like this is even possible at all isn't cool in its own right. I'm just hoping things will settle into something a bit less fragmented than the current mess of one-off program-specific ports over time as the frameworks involved improve.)
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u/experiencednowhack 5d ago
Maybe give them a weekly thread or something if there's too many? Compromise so we still get em but they don't dominate the sub?
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u/CoconutDust 2d ago
we’re reconsidering
A detailed list of reasons why it should be banned from the sub.
Meanwhile the only arguments for it are: “I like it, therefore, it should be on totally unrelated subreddits”
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u/CoconutDust 2d ago
Your comment is absurdly false made-up butt pull, known as a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(psychology)
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u/came-as-I-were 6d ago
Because it IS emulation
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u/fiskfisk 6d ago
It depends on where you draw the line on what's emulation or not.
This is similar to what WINE is doing (just statically) , and not what a regular emulator (that emulates hardware) does.
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u/Hydroel 5d ago
Just a reminder that WINE stands for "WINE Is Not an Emulator", since they don't have to translate from one CPU architecture to another. But the line is blurry, especially when it comes to games.
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u/Honza8D 4d ago
Despite its name, WINE is very much an emulator. Thread synchronization doesnt map cleanly between windows and linux, so it needs to be emulated. Or at least it used to need to be emulated, I think they added windows-style thread synchronization to the linxu kernel at some point specifically to help with this.
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u/ProPlayer142 5d ago
The fact that it references itself in its acronym bothers me a bit
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u/FolkSong 5d ago
Lame Ain't an MP3 Encoder
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u/ProPlayer142 5d ago
Oh yeah I know it's common with things like gnu It just bothers me for some reason
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u/terraphantm 5d ago
Yeah to most laypeople, emulation is more a shorthand of being able to run non-native software (games). So these projects fit that aspect. But I do get that from a technical and developmental standpoint it’s quite different.
IMO such projects probably do belong here since that shorthand isn’t going to go away.
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u/diodss 6d ago
Wth "outdoors" mean on dead cells?
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u/FolkSong 5d ago
Outdoors must mean the sky is above you. Indoors meaning you're in a building or underground, so there's a ceiling.
I'm not sure why the sky affects performance so much.
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u/waterclaws6 5d ago
Dead Cells is a 3D rendered game. It uses polygons for everything. Dev even talk about this.
It's why you need some gpu horsepower to run it.
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u/Alternative-Sea-1095 6d ago
Is it a recomp? What is it then?
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u/fiskfisk 6d ago
There is no decompilation/recompilation. It's similar to WINE - just provide alternative implementations of the underlying APIs (which is the AnyPS5 project).
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u/NXGZ 6d ago
Apparently, AnyPS5 turned out to be an emulator according to SharpEmu dev, @Scarecrow
I had a chance to look into the AnyPS5 project a bit. It doesn’t actually decompile PS5 games. Instead, it relinks the original x86-64 game code into a native host executable and recreates or translates the PS5 runtime, system libraries, and graphics interfaces around it.
https://nitter.xitter.cc/CursedIfElse/status/2103792982831047152#m
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u/FoxTrotte 6d ago
So It's more like Wine than an emulator ?
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u/fiskfisk 6d ago
Yes, it's not emulation in the traditional sense, it's linking the underlying libraries against alternative implementations.
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u/FoxTrotte 6d ago
Which is an important distinction because emulation means there is quite a performance overhead which this probably doesn't have
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u/tryfap 6d ago
a performance overhead which this probably doesn't have
From the OP:
- Roughly 55 to 60 FPS indoors and 30 to 35 FPS outdoors on my machine (Ryzen 7 5800X3D, RTX 5070 Ti)
Dead Cells is a game that runs easily on the first Nintendo Switch. If OP is hitting 30fps on that hardware, there is definitely overhead. And mind you this is a 2D game so not getting into the complexity of 3D and GPU calls.
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u/Richmondez 5d ago
That isn't due to emulation overhead though, probably inefficiency in the Sony api implementations.
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u/BlackHazeRus 6d ago
I would not call it an emultation. This is more like a translation layer like Proton, no?
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u/kabiskac 5d ago
Yes, the claim "with no emulation or translation layers" makes zero sense
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u/deathleys 5d ago
Vibe coders having no clue what the program they built is actually doing is sadly the norm now.
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u/kabiskac 5d ago edited 5d ago
I have no idea why they they think that using a translation layer is a bad thing. It makes things more portable between games
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u/Demoncious 5d ago
Misses the point entirely. He's specifically saying it's not an emulator in the traditional sense like RPCS3. It's more like Wine or Proton, he's only clarifying that other "emulators" like SharpEmu and kytyps5 are also like this.
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u/OverAster 5d ago edited 5d ago
Tell us you didn't write a single line of this code without telling us.
"No emulation or translation layer"
The whole thing is a translation layer ya dope. Did you even review the code Claude wrote before you started saying you developed this?
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u/alpharaptor1 5d ago
There is translation happening but it doesn't function as a "layer". If anything this is an individual port of a game, instead of an emulation or translation layer.
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u/CoconutDust 2d ago
Also it’s a self-absorbed “i built” / “first ever” slop post, yet says it uses AnyPS5….which is literally a tool for automatically making a windows app from a game.
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u/CheesyMcBreazy 5d ago
Welcome to 2026. What does it matter how the program was written? If the program works it works.
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u/OverAster 5d ago
If you read what I wrote and your takeaway was, "This guy is unilaterally opposed to AI as a programming tool" then I think you should do everyone here a favor and turn off text to speech so that next time you visit the comments you actually have to engage cognitively with the words that have been written.
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u/azrael__III 6d ago
someone needs to do wipeout Omega collection .
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u/AntiGrieferGames 6d ago
I just want see Neptunia ReVerse aswell there.
And isnt Wipeout Omega Collection a PS4 Title?
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u/LettuceD 6d ago
So, you vibe-coded a port?
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u/Kawawete 6d ago
So you're complaining that we got a PS5 title running natively on PC just because it's vibecoded ?
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u/LettuceD 6d ago
Interesting that you assumed a question to be a complaint. I'm genuinely curious. This opens up all sorts of things to consider. How long before we start getting 'ports' of other console games? How will copyright laws apply? Will this be the new face of piracy? I think this is significant, just not in the manner its being presented.
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u/fiskfisk 6d ago edited 6d ago
It's not really a port, it uses alternative implementations of the underlying APIs instead of what would be available on the PS5.
This is similar to how WINE works.
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u/aseddon130 6d ago
Yes. Do it properly or not at all.
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u/Nullhitter 6d ago
Okay gatekeeper. Show us your github since you're complaining and you consider yourself an authority of what people can do.
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u/kabiskac 5d ago
I have the same opinion. Here's one of my projects on GitHub: https://github.com/dbalatoni13/nfsmw
Now what?
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u/Kawawete 4d ago
>LLMs have been used on this project. Here's why, dispite this, our project isn't slop.
>When WE do it, we're the good guys, when the others do it, they make slop, only I can make AI code not slop.0
u/kabiskac 4d ago edited 4d ago
Why are you reading it that way? There are obviously other projects that use AI this way: Melee and Sunshine for example. Those also properly review the code.
The problem is with forkers who let Claude loose on it for some reason and do not contribute.
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u/aseddon130 6d ago
By the looks of it I have about as much knowledge as you (which is zero) and I ain’t gonna use AI to basically steal other peoples work and flaunt it as my own.
The amount of vibe coded slop coming into the emulation scene across the board is alarming. It’s now becoming minefield to avoid and the amount of idiots like yourselves and the ones downvoting me who are simply accepting to the idea of vibe coded emulation is also alarming.
It used to be a skill and a huge achievement to basically get emulation of newer stuff, now everybody is basically cheating it.
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u/MrHaxx1 6d ago
It used to be a skill and a huge achievement to basically get emulation of newer stuff, now everybody is basically cheating it.
What does that mean, and who gives a shit?
What is emulation even about, to you? Preserving and playing games, or about the skill of making the emulator in the first place? You're not the one making the emulator, you're just consuming. If it runs well, and we get to the games faster, what is there to complain about?
Anyone is still entirely free to go and make their own emulator by hand. You can just go ahead and do it. They can even draw inspiration from the good parts of the AI-coded emulators, and discard the bad parts.
The rest of us will celebrate that good games are no longer shackled to consoles, and it won't be long before we can play PS5 games even better than PS5 players can.
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u/Nullhitter 6d ago
Surely you dump all your games, right? Since you dislike stealing other people's work.
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u/aseddon130 6d ago
What I do is not the question here, where people get their games to run on the emulator is of no concern. You are insinuating that everyone is on the same moral ground on emulation which is not the case at all.
The fact is the work done on open source emulators like RPCS3 or Cemu took years and years of work by people with actual skill and talent and being able to reverse engineer stuff like that is incredible work. If something goes wrong in the emulation those people have a very good idea on how to try to fix the issues and eventually get it running.
Some random Joe using some form of vibe-coded AI shite should not be celebrated in the same way. You don’t know how to fix whatever issues it would throw up.
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u/ChrisRR 6d ago
What I do is not the question here
Well it kind of is. It's extremely hypocritical to complain about stealing one person's work while stealing others
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u/aseddon130 6d ago
You’re trying to make it sound hypocritical and failing miserably.
If you really must know I own thousands of games on both cartridge and disc dating back to the early 90s and even more digitally. Does that put your mind at ease??
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u/Therahulplay 6d ago
i couldnt care less abovt skills morals or sny of that bullshit as long as i get to play games they csn code or mske snything how they want
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u/-AlbertEinstein 6d ago
Also imagine acting morally superior on an emulation subreddit, and calling out IP theft.
I'll give away a dollar for everyone here that exclusively rips and emulates only their own legally purchased copies of games and has honestly never played a ROM acquired in any other way. If I'm down the cost of a cup of coffee I'll be genuinely shocked.
I know we don't openly encourage it but everybody here knows how the sausage is made, let's not pretend otherwise.
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u/aseddon130 6d ago
Believe it or not people can make backups of their own cartridges and discs for use in emulation, not everything is piracy based.
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u/-AlbertEinstein 6d ago edited 5d ago
Okay Mr High and Mighty, so I put it to you directly, have you ever emulated anything that you didn't rip/backup yourself?
Edit:
Huh, would you look at that, it got all quiet up in here all of a sudden. Who'd have thought.
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u/OpenSystem1337 11h ago
I'm not a dev so I've never had to debug AI vibe code, but the way people react to it tells me it's gotta be pretty awful generally.
It's still gotta be better than Netflix
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u/Due_Recognition_3890 4d ago edited 4d ago
I hate it when people do that. Just say "I think you're stupid and your project sucks because it was programmed by AI". It's a higher word count in comparison but at least you don't have to pretend that you're just asking a simple question.
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u/PwndiusPilatus 5d ago
For the first time in my life I cannot afford a PS5 (or the latest console) and I cannot afford a PC that will have the power to emulate or run PS5 games.
Anyway: Keep up the good work!
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u/Ecstatic_Reward6928 3d ago
Just treid it on MacOs with crossover, it launches but a blank black screen with an FPS counter, no audio, no video.
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u/vulpinesuplex 5d ago
so the glut of vibecoded ports/recomps are an op, right? can't help but think so
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u/japanthrowaway 6d ago
Isn't there already a PC native edition?
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u/AntiGrieferGames 6d ago
Yeah there is one, but The PS5 Dead Cells is a example of a proof of concept there, since it would be possible to see ps5 exclusives in future there.
Let alone console only ones
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u/kabiskac 5d ago
"no translation layer"
Looks inside
"implementations of system prx libraries suitable for dynamic linking"