The PlayStation 5 Can Finally Play Your Old PS2 Discs - Here's How

True backwards compatibility for physical disc games ended with the PlayStation 4. While Sony eventually re-released some older titles digitally, you can't put a PS2 or PS3 disc into your PS4 to play legacy games. That restriction carried over to the PlayStation 5. PS4 discs are compatible, but for anything older you need a digital copy, technically emulated, and Sony is very slow at releasing those. Even today, the classic games section on PSN is incredibly limited, reserved for some of the most popular titles but also a fraction of the true catalog across all three older consoles from the PlayStation 1 to PlayStation 3. That's about to change. Well, kind of. A new port of the PCSX2 emulator — vibe-coded with Claude — has been released for jailbroken PS5s, aptly retitled PS5SX2.

With it, you can take your old PS2 discs, insert them into the PS5's disc tray, and the system will then dump a digital copy to the SSD for emulation. There's a caveat, however, which presents a hard limitation. The PS5's physical disc drive can read Blu-Rays and DVDs, but can't read CDs. So, only PS2 games pressed onto DVDs are compatible. Many older PS2 titles, cool blue sides and all, are actually CD-ROMs, so they won't work, and neither will PS1 games — which are also on CD-ROMs.

Of course, that doesn't completely dampen the excitement of PS5SX2's version 2.01 release being able to natively dump, launch, and play older PS2 titles you've still got on your shelf. PS5SX2 also introduces support for RetroAchievements, online play for select games through an emulated network adapter, HD texture packs, and a ton of other improvements. This is similar to how the Xbox Series X can now play limited PlayStation 5 games thanks to a community-made emulator.

PS5SX2's lead coder, Swordpdf (@sword_pdf) also briefly announced on both X and Discord that a PS3 emulator is coming; PS5SX3. Like the PS2 version, you'll be able to insert your PS3 game discs, and have them dumped to the PS5 hard drive for playing. When that's eventually available, the PS5 will have almost full backwards compatibility with older discs. No, it doesn't necessarily feel like something impossible is being done here, but it certainly sends a message to Sony.

Swordpdf also seems to think they will someday be able to do the same with PS1 discs. If that's the case, especially considering PS1 discs are all CDs, would that mean the PS2 support would also expand to include those blue-tinted copies currently out of reach? Presumably, PS5SX3 would also bring along a bunch of improvements like the other emulators. At the very least, the upgrade to PS5's more powerful hardware would be an interesting boon. You could finally repurpose that old PS3 console that's sitting around collecting dust.

Bear in mind, this isn't something you can get running without jailbreaking your PS5, which requires keeping it on an older version of official firmware to achieve. Since many newer games require firmware updates beyond what can be jailbroken, like "Marvel's Wolverine," it could put that possibility out of reach if you've already upgraded. While slightly unrelated, now is a good time to point out, if you didn't know, that you can also preserve some of those old PS2 and PS3 titles you own using specialized Blu-Ray players.