Developer Sword has introduced physical disc support for the PS5SX2 emulator, a native port of PCSX2 designed for jailbroken PlayStation 5 consoles. This feature debuted in the beta version 2.01, released on October 10. The emulator functions by copying the disc contents to the console storage upon the first insertion, subsequently launching the game from that local copy.
The developer noted that the current implementation has been tested only on a single original PS5 unit. Due to hardware limitations, the internal optical drive of the PS5 cannot read CDs, meaning PS2 games distributed on that format remain unsupported. However, version 2.02 introduced an experimental feature allowing the use of external USB DVD or Blu-ray drives to read discs.
The emulator supports rendering at up to 6x the native PS2 resolution, though the developer warns that some titles may exceed the performance capabilities of the standard PS5 hardware. Looking ahead, Sword is developing an RPCS3 port to enable PS3 disc support. These updates arrive as Sony prepares to cease physical disc production for new PlayStation games by January 2028.
