Before generative artificial intelligence took off, the process of jailbreaking a video game console was a slow, tedious ordeal. That's not the case anymore.

Within the PS5 homebrew scene on Reddit, the forums have been lit up with posts about PS5SX2, an app that lets jailbroken PS5s play PlayStation 2 games. It's a big deal, given that Sony removed backward compatibility from its consoles starting with the release of the PS4 in 2013.

PS5SX2 is part of a larger wave of PS5 jailbreaks, which are coming at a furious pace in 2026.

Version 1.00 of PS5SX2 had plenty of early bugs, with commenters trading fixes for crashes and missing-game errors. Within roughly two weeks, a 2.00 update had added frame generation and multi-disc support. Another post in the jailbreak community claimed that PS3 games can now run on jailbroken PS5s as well.

Additionally, there's another public jailbreak called Relapse. Released in late September, the exploit chain was published by developer Nathan Fargo and works on firmware versions 7.00 through 13.60. The previous public jailbreak topped out at 12.70, so Relapse covers a big chunk of recent consoles. It works on any PS5 that hasn’t been updated to firmware 14.00, which Sony released on Sept. 16.

For decades, console jailbreaking moved slowly for a reason. As reported by Gizmodo , it’s both legally risky and technically demanding. , circumventing a console’s copyright protection runs afoul of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The Librarian of Congress grants exemptions every three years for devices like smartphones and smart TVs, but consoles aren’t among them.

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