More progress on PS5 Homebrew support

Could these be the PS5’s “first” homebrew applications? Tremendous progress is being made on homebrew support for the PS5, through Astrelsky‘s Libhijacker.

Scene Developer LightningMods has been showcasing some basic homebrew apps running on the PS5 (with more or less success when it comes to rendering on the screen), including a simple “Hello World”, and what appears to be a first attempt at some actual game. Some of the hacker’s work has already made its way into Libhijacker’s codebase.

PS5 Homebrew – Current status

LibHijacker is the scene’s current best hope to get a Homebrew Loader on the PS5.

The tool has been making significant progress on a daily basis (a week ago the tool could load homebrew, now it can – to some extent – actually run them), and for those of you who have been following this site for a (very) long time, this will probably remind you of the very early days of PSP’s HBL, when every single commit was a significant improvement (example here, where apparently getting a way to exit homebrew and go back to the menu was great enough for me to justify a release).

CrazyVoid has recently clarified that packaged apps on the PS5 are divided in several categories, namely SCE_LNC_APP_TYPE_BIG_APP, SCE_LNC_APP_TYPE_MINI_APP, SCE_LNC_APP_TYPE_INVALID, SCE_LNC_APP_TYPE_DAEMON, SCE_LNC_APP_TYPE_CDLG,SCE_LNC_APP_TYPE_SHELL_APP. “Big App” and “Mini App” in particular are

“Homebrew” apps on the PS5 are categorized as “Big Apps”, which is why you’ll see that name once in a while on the scene, and that’s the wording LightningMods has been using as well.

 

 

Today the hacker shared some additional progress with what he calls an “early stage tetris’. Not sure if he’s joking because of how the rendering happened with whatever he’s trying to display on screen, or if this is really some early attempt at a basic homebrew game (or renderer).

 

Of course we’re still far from getting full fledged homebrew and emulators on the PS5, although in my experience, once the basic bricks are in place, it’s possible to go from “meh, I guess this could work” to unlocking support for e.g. most PS4 homebrew running on the PS5 overnight. Don’t quote me on this, ha!

Downloads

As a reminder, you need a hacked PS5 to run all these tools.

LightningMods hasn’t shared any of these “homebrew” publicly yet, however some of his work can be found in Libhijacker’s codebase here. For those interested to dive deeper into this, I have a tutorial here on how to compile PS5 payloads such as Libhijacker.