The emulator community has reached another important milestone. Enthusiasts have successfully used an open-source PlayStation 5 emulator called SharpEmu to run Astro’s Playroom, a platform game exclusive to the current-generation Sony console, directly on a Steam Deck portable PC. This is the first documented case of an actual PS5 project being able to be downloaded natively on a Valve portable device without using streaming or cloud services.
Of course, it’s too early to talk about a comfortable gaming experience – in SteamOS desktop mode, the performance counter remained in the range of 0.5 to 1 FPS, and the sound was choppy. The SharpEmu emulator itself is written in C# and was originally created with broad cross-platform in mind, natively supporting Linux and macOS, while the Kyty emulator is more advanced in 3D graphics processing and is limited to Windows. SharpEmu can already handle light 2D games quite reliably on powerful hardware, but successfully initializing a heavy 3D project on a regular laptop APU is a good demonstration of the viability of the emulator architecture.