XashPS5 — Half-Life on PlayStation 5

Native PS5 homebrew port of Xash3D FWGS running Half-Life, Opposing Force, Blue Shift and Counter-Strike, rendered on the PS5 GPU through Vulkan: OpenGL translated by Mesa Zink, executed by the RADV driver of PS5_Vulkan. Packaged with ps5-native-app-boilerplate.

Version 1.3: title PPSA19111, shown as XashPS5 V1.3 on the home screen.

120 FPS: turn it on in the game. XashPS5 starts in 4K at 60 Hz. On a 120 Hz display (HDMI 2.1), open Options → Video → Video modes and tick 120 Hz: the game restarts and runs at up to 120 FPS. The console must also allow 120 Hz output (Settings → Screen and Video → Video Output → 120 Hz Output).

No game data is included. You need your own copy of Half-Life (the valve folder from Steam), and of the expansions you want to play. Valve's files are not, and will never be, distributed here.

Features

• Native PS5 title (signed eboot.bin), launched from the home screen like a game
• Vulkan rendering (Zink on RADV): 4K by default, steady 60 FPS in busy scenes, and 120 FPS on 120 Hz displays once 120 Hz is ticked in Options → Video → Video modes (off by default)
• Render resolution 4K / 1440p / 1080p from the same menu
• Half-Life single player and LAN multiplayer
• Opposing Force (gearbox), Blue Shift (bshift) and Counter-Strike (cstrike), switchable from the main menu with Change game
• Counter-Strike with its own client, server and menus (cs16-client and ReGameDLL_CS): team selection, buy menu, MOTD, and a Change team button in the pause menu
• In-game VGUI windows (MOTD, team menus) usable with the gamepad: Cross = OK, Circle / Options = close
• DualSense: full layout, vibration, right-stick aim curve, toggle crouch (Options → Gamepad, on by default)
• USB keyboard and mouse (or a wireless USB receiver): WASD/arrows by key position on any layout, mouse look, buttons and wheel, mouse cursor in the menus. Typed text uses the QWERTY layout by default: ps5_kb_layout fr switches to AZERTY
• PS5 system keyboard for text fields (console, player name, chat)
• Sound through sceAudioOut
• Debug menu in the main menu: load any map, god mode, all weapons, full health, noclip, notarget, vibration test
• A notification explains what is missing when the game files aren't installed
• Custom home-screen icon and background

Requirements

• PS5 with a homebrew-enabled firmware (tested with etaHEN; FTP server on port 2121, klog on 3232 for debugging)
• Linux build host (tested on Debian 13): git, python3, make, cmake, ninja, meson, rsync, clang-18, LLVM/Clang 19 development packages for Mesa (see vulkan/README.md)
• Your own game folders

Build

git clone https://github.com/GordonProsperoMan/xash3d-ps5.git
cd xash3d-ps5
./scripts/build.sh          # sources, game code (HL, OF, BS, CS), engine
./vulkan/build_vulkan.sh    # Mesa Zink + RADV, relink, package dist/PPSA19111

Every upstream project is cloned at the exact commit listed in patches/UPSTREAM_COMMITS.txt and patched with the files in patches/. build.sh also leaves an OpenGL (G19) build in dist/gl/PPSA19111 for comparison. How the Vulkan path works is explained in vulkan/README.md. The first run takes a while (Mesa is compiled twice).

Install

1. Copy your own game folders into dist/PPSA19111/: valve/ (required) and, if you own them, gearbox/, bshift/, cstrike/. Keep the .cfg files and extras.pk3 from this build in each folder (controls, menu graphics, Counter-Strike menus). If you already have an autoexec.cfg, just append its lines. The release zip doesn't ship cstrike/extras.pk3 (it contains game sounds and maps): take it from the cstrike folder of CS16Client-Linux-x86_64.tar.gz in cs16-client's releases.
2. Send it to the console:

   python3 scripts/deploy.py dist/PPSA19111 <ps5-ip>
   # later, engine-only redeploys:
   python3 scripts/deploy.py dist/PPSA19111 <ps5-ip> --only-engine
   

3. Launch XashPS5 V1.3 from the home screen. The first launch takes a little longer while the shader cache is built.
4. For 120 FPS, tick 120 Hz in Options → Video → Video modes (see above).

Controls

DualSense

Button	Action
Left stick / right stick	Move / look
Cross	Jump
Circle	Crouch (toggle)
Square	Reload
Triangle	Use (doors, buttons, scientists)
R2 / L2	Primary / secondary fire
R1 / L1	Next / previous weapon
D-pad down	Last weapon
R3	Flashlight
D-pad up	Flashlight (Counter-Strike: buy menu)
L3	Walk
Options	Menu
Touchpad click	Scoreboard

Layouts live in each game's userconfig.cfg (executed after Steam's config.cfg, which starts with unbindall).

Keyboard and mouse

Half-Life's PC defaults: WASD (by key position), mouse look, left/right click to fire, wheel for weapons, Escape for the menu. Rebind them in Options → Keyboard.

How it works (porting notes)

Problem on PS5 native titles	Solution
Payload CRT (crt1.o) crashes as a title	boilerplate's native CRT + custom link script
dlopen unusable	engine, renderer, menus, filesystem and every game's code linked into one static binary (scripts/build_static_gamelibs.py, scripts/wrap_static_gamelib.py); the engine picks server@<game> / client@<game> / menu@<game> by game folder
chdir denied, opendir lists nothing	virtual cwd + sceKernelGetdents wrappers (engine/platform/ps5/ps5_vcwd.c)
Tiny default heap	1 GB application heap from ps5-opengl's app_heap.c
The PS5 OpenGL driver submits draws one by one (40–50 ms per frame in busy scenes, even after batching to indexed triangle lists)	Mesa Zink records whole frames into Vulkan command buffers for RADV: about 2 ms of draws (see vulkan/README.md)
120 Hz	the title declares high-frame-rate output; VideoOut is opened at 119.88 Hz only when the player ticks 120 Hz
SDL2 built without audio	sceAudioOut backend (engine/platform/ps5/s_ps5.c)
System keyboard: sceImeDialog* never resolved through sceKernelDlsym	sceCommonDialogInitialize + sceSysmoduleLoadModule(ImeDialog) with regular imports and a link-only libSceCommonDialog stub, as in BlackBearReloaded's ProsperoTV
USB keyboard and mouse	libSceKeyboard / libSceMouse loaded through their sysmodules, batched reads of HID records (engine/platform/ps5/kbm_ps5.c), following BlackBearReloaded's ps5-native-gamepad-input-research; the menus get a drawn cursor (no system cursor)
dup() is a raw syscall (crash when a file inside a .pk3 is opened)	the filesystem reopens the archive instead
ReGameDLL_CS loads the filesystem with dlopen	it gets the engine's statically linked filesystem interface
exit() raises SIGSYS in a native title	Quit closes the app through sceSystemServiceLoadExec("exit")
Logs	every console line mirrored to the kernel log and to /data/xash_log.txt; the previous run is kept as /data/xash_log_previous.txt. Create /data/xash_debug.txt for verbose output

Known limitations

• Counter-Strike bots (YaPB) are not included yet: play LAN or alone.
• Internet server browser untested; LAN works.
• Accented characters are not typed from a USB keyboard yet.

Thanks

• Mihawk: PS5_Vulkan, PS5_Mesa and PS5_PayloadSDK, the RADV Vulkan driver this build renders with.
• BlackBearReloaded: ps5-opengl, ps5-native-app-boilerplate, ProsperoTV (system keyboard sequence) and ps5-native-gamepad-input-research (keyboard and mouse).
• Velaron and contributors: cs16-client, and the ReGameDLL_CS team.
• mpereiraesaa/ps5-xash3d-halflife, another native PS5 Xash3D port: right-stick aim curve and its tuning, and the release allowlist check.
• FWGS: Xash3D FWGS, hlsdk-portable, mainui_cpp.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later, like the projects it is built on (Xash3D FWGS, ps5-opengl, ps5-native-app-boilerplate). Mesa, ReGameDLL_CS and YaPB are MIT-licensed; cs16-client is GPL-2.0-or-later with the Half-Life exception. hlsdk-portable is distributed under the Half-Life SDK license terms of its upstream. Half-Life and Counter-Strike are © Valve Corporation.