Jailbroken PS5s can now emulate PS3 games from physical discs

Just days after releasing a PS2 disc emulator for jailbroken PS5s, coder Swordpdf has unveiled RPS5S3 — a tool that lets jailbroken PS5s run games straight from physical PS3 discs. A video posted to X shows Gran Turismo 5 booting up after inserting a physical PS3 copy into a PS5's disc tray.

RPS5S3 is still in early development — the latest version circulating on the PS5SX2 Discord is labeled "Test Build 3" and there's no public GitHub repository yet. That means no official compatibility list exists, but the Discord identifies Grand Theft Auto IV, God of War: Ascension, LittleBigPlanet, inFamous, and MotorStorm: Pacific Rift as the most-played titles so far. The name strongly implies it's a fork of RPCS3, the well-established PC-based PS3 emulator, though Swordpdf hasn't confirmed that directly. Given that Swordpdf openly used Claude AI to vibecode the earlier PS5SX2 project — even crediting it as a contributor on GitHub — it's a reasonable assumption that AI-assisted coding is involved here too.

The speed of all this is the real story. PS5SX2 went live on October 9. RPS5S3's second test build appeared on Discord the very next afternoon. That two-day turnaround for porting a complex emulator to new hardware would have been essentially unthinkable before AI coding tools entered the picture. RPS5S3 is also just the latest in a string of recent PS5 security blows — the "Relapse" jailbreak exploit targeting July 2026 firmware and a separate project emulating the PS5's entire operating system on PC have both been tied to AI-assisted development in the past two weeks.

With no public release yet, RPS5S3 remains out of reach for most users, but the pace of progress suggests that won't be the case for long. Sony's legal team is almost certainly paying close attention.