Sony has steadily been rolling out PSX, PS2, and PSP games for its PlayStation Plus Classics Catalog, but it turns out the PS5 is capable of Xbox-style backwards compatibility, too.

As reported by Tom's Hardware, modder Sword has released a native port of the PCSX2 emulator for jailbroken PlayStation 5 consoles, allowing you to play PS2 games directly from physical discs. When you insert a disc, the emulator copies its data onto the console's storage first, launching the game locally. Again, just like Xbox through its backwards compatibility program.

If you don't have a disc drive (or yours is broken), external USB ones work too.

PS5SX2 supports discs from any region, alongside the ISO, CHD, CSO, and ZSO formats commonly used for PS2 game images. There's just one catch: the PS5's built-in optical drive can't read CDs, meaning CD-based PS2 games won't work through it. That's a limitation of the console's optical hardware, however, rather than something Sword can fix.

Even so, it's an ingenious workaround that brings PS2 games to the PS5 through a native emulator. And, as you'd expect with an emulator, it comes with plenty of enhancements, including up to 6x resolution scaling for 4K output, post-processing filters, widescreen and 60fps patches for supported games, and even online play through community servers using an emulated network adapter.

Sword isn't stopping at PS2 games, either. Players have been hankering for native PS3 backwards compatibility for years, especially given that playing PS3 games on PS5 means relying on decidedly unreliable cloud streaming through PlayStation Plus Premium.

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