Switch 2 emulation boots on jailbroken PS5 at 15-20 FPS

Early Switch 2 emulation has reached jailbroken hardware just days after the November 5 release of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake on Nintendo's platform. Independent developers have managed to initialize the title on both a modified PlayStation 5 console and an iPhone 17 Pro Max, proving that community-built tools can already parse retail Switch 2 game assets outside of native hardware.

This breakthrough is primarily relevant for homebrew developers and emulation enthusiasts closely tracking modern platform architecture. However, early adopters should keep expectations in check: neither platform provides an actual playable experience yet. Both setups face steep memory bottlenecks, with the PlayStation 5 build crashing after mere minutes and struggling to maintain 15 to 20 frames per second.

Running EglantinePS5 on Firmware 12.40

On the PlayStation 5 side, developer Vampinity documented the experimental test results via the EglantinePS5 repository on GitHub. EglantinePS5 is a console port of a Switch emulator, constructed on the foundation of the Eden emulation project. The environment targets compromised PlayStation 5 systems running firmware version 12.40 through the Relapse exploit, an implementation that supports system versions between 7.00 and 13.60.

During benchmark testing, the emulator successfully loaded an existing game save, allowing Link to step out of his house and navigate into Kokiri Forest. The experience remains heavily compromised, delivering between 15 and 20 FPS before running out of memory and crashing after a few minutes of activity. Visual fidelity also suffers from severe white fogging artifacts and missing environmental models. Vampinity noted that the code relies on patches written with assistance from Claude and stated plainly that the build remains far from playable. Much of the underlying shader translation was borrowed from Lichii, an emulator fork that previously managed to boot the remake on PC on launch day.

Surpassing iOS Memory Ceilings on iPhone 17 Pro Max

Simultaneously, developer Joe Jiang demonstrated The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake booting on an iPhone 17 Pro Max. Unlike the compromised rendering on the console port, Jiang's showcase displayed Kokiri Forest with fully intact scene lighting and geometry.

The primary hurdle in porting the title to iOS centered on system memory constraints. The remake typically demands around 9 GB of RAM to run, which directly clashes with Apple's strict operating system limits that cap memory allocation for a single application at 8,192 MB (8 GB). To work around this ceiling, Jiang implemented a custom optimization pipeline that reportedly caps peak RAM consumption during scene loading at just 3.4 GB while preserving visual fidelity.

Broader Ecosystem Ambitions and Nintendo's Response

Jiang noted that this memory management architecture was not developed as a one-off fix for Ocarina of Time Remake. The underlying framework is designed to help both original Switch and Switch 2 software run across a wider spectrum of operating systems, including iOS, iPadOS, Apple TV, Android, and HarmonyOS. The software pipeline has not been made available to the public.

This demonstration follows earlier homebrew milestones on iOS, where Mario Kart World was booted on an iPhone shortly after the first Switch 2 exploit details emerged. While neither the PlayStation 5 nor iOS ports currently serve as practical ways to play through the game, the speed at which developers bypassed platform barriers highlights how quickly the community is deciphering Nintendo's updated architecture.

Do you expect mobile chipsets to eventually handle modern console emulation without stability crashes, or will desktop hardware remain the only practical environment for high-end emulation?