Dusklight for PlayStation 5

A PS5 homebrew port of Dusklight, the reverse-engineered reimplementation of a classic GameCube adventure. It draws through Dusklight's own renderer (Aurora on Dawn's WebGPU) on RADV, Mesa's Vulkan driver, from the PS5 Vulkan stack.

It needs a PS5 that already runs homebrew, and a disc image of the game that you provide. No game data, Nintendo artwork, Sony software or keys are included, here or in a build.

This is an unofficial port. It is not part of the Dusklight project and is not supported by it: please do not take PS5 problems to them.

Status

Tested on one console, on 2026-10-10 and 11, with the GameCube USA disc (GZ2E01). "Seen" means it ran there and was watched, or read in the console's log; nothing else is claimed.

Area	Seen on the console	Not yet verified
Start-up	Finds the disc image in the title's folder, boots into the game	Exit back to the home screen from the game's own menu
Rendering	3840x2160 on a 59.94 Hz display, several minutes of play with no crash	Frame rate over a long session; 120 Hz; later areas of the game
Saving	A memory card file is created, and a save survived closing and restarting the title
Input	A DualSense plays the game	Each button of the mapping; rumble; a second controller
Sound		Everything: the driver opens, nobody has confirmed what it sounds like
Shader cache	Aurora's pipeline cache opens and is written	That it is reused after a restart

Known limits:

• Objects can appear a frame late the first time a scene shows them. Aurora compiles each new render pipeline on a worker thread and skips the draw until it is ready, as it does on every platform. They are cached once compiled.
• Disc images: GameCube .iso or .ciso only. Upstream reads RVZ, GCZ, WIA and WBFS through a Rust library; this port has its own small reader in its place (ps5/nod/). Wii discs are not supported.
• No code mods, no updater, no Discord presence, no network. They are turned off in this build.
• No file dialog. The disc image is found by where it is, not chosen.

Install

Download Dusklight-PS5-vX.Y.Z.zip from the latest release and unpack it: it holds one folder, PPSA99305. (Or build that folder yourself, see Build.) It contains no game data.

What the console needs

• A PS5 that runs homebrew, with etaHEN (or an equivalent) loaded.
• ShadowMountPlus, which shows the folders in /data/homebrew as titles on the home screen.
• An FTP server on the console to copy files with (port 2121 here).

Steps

1. Unpack the release (or build: the result is the folder dist/PPSA99305/).

2. Copy that whole folder to the console as /data/homebrew/PPSA99305/, so that you have:

   /data/homebrew/PPSA99305/eboot.bin
   /data/homebrew/PPSA99305/sce_sys/      (param.json, icon0.png, pic0.dds, pic1.dds)
   /data/homebrew/PPSA99305/sce_module/libc.prx
   /data/homebrew/PPSA99305/res/          (fonts and the menus' documents)
   /data/homebrew/PPSA99305/licenses/
   

   Copy sce_sys/icon0.png with the first upload: ShadowMountPlus will not register a title without its icon, and after two failed tries it skips that title until it is restarted.

3. Copy your disc image into the same folder, under any name ending in .iso or .ciso:

   /data/homebrew/PPSA99305/your-disc.iso
   

   It has to be there, not elsewhere in /data: a title can only see its own folder. The game takes the first image it finds and remembers it.

4. Wait a few seconds for "Dusklight" to appear on the home screen, and start it.

Saves and settings are written to /data/homebrew/PPSA99305/userdata/. Copying a new build over the folder leaves them, and the disc image, alone.

The disc image. Dusklight's own terms apply: dump your own copy of the game (how). If your dump is RVZ or another compressed format, convert it to .iso with Dolphin or nodtool first.

Build

The build runs on Linux (x86-64 or arm64; on a Mac, in a Linux VM) with Mihawk's stack beside this repository:

somewhere/
  PS5_Dusklight/     this repository
  PS5_Vulkan/        https://github.com/mihawk-99/PS5_Vulkan   (with its RADV release archive built)
  PS5_Mesa/          https://github.com/mihawk-99/PS5_Mesa
  PS5_PayloadSDK/    https://github.com/mihawk-99/PS5_PayloadSDK

Set that stack up first, by its own instructions, until PS5_Vulkan has .deps/native/radv-release/lib/libvulkan_radeon.ps5.a and build/host/ps5-native-tool. It needs LLVM 22: RADV built with an older clang does not link into a title. Then:

git clone https://github.com/griches/PS5_Dusklight.git
cd PS5_Dusklight
ps5/tools/build.sh

build.sh does the rest, and the first run takes a while:

1. checks out Dusklight (vendor/dusklight) with Aurora and Borealis, and applies ps5/patches/ to them;
2. fetches Dawn and SDL3 at the revisions Aurora pins into .deps/, and patches them for the console;
3. installs the payload SDK at this port's pin;
4. configures Dusklight's own CMake build with the SDK's toolchain and ps5/cmake/ps5-game.cmake, compiles about 3,000 files, links with RADV and writes dist/PPSA99305/.

Other tools, all in ps5/tools/:

Tool	What it does
deploy.sh	Uploads dist/PPSA99305/ over FTP (the console's address is PS5_HOST in PS5_Vulkan/.env). It never touches the disc image or userdata/.
run.sh	Launches the title through PS5_Vulkan's control payload and follows its log; symbolises a crash.
package-release.sh VERSION	Packs dist/PPSA99305/ as a release zip with SOURCE.txt, the revision of every part. Refuses if a disc image or a save is in the folder.
build-triangle.sh	Builds a one-triangle WebGPU test in the game's place: the first thing to run when Dawn or the driver changes.
vm.sh TOOL	From macOS, runs one of the above inside a Lima VM named ps5.
update-dusklight.sh	Moves to upstream Dusklight's latest revision and re-applies the patches.
check-patches.sh	Says whether the Dawn and SDL3 patches apply to what Aurora now pins.

Keeping up with Dusklight

vendor/dusklight is a submodule at an upstream revision; nothing of Dusklight is copied or forked here. What the console needs changed in Dusklight, Aurora and Borealis is three small patches in ps5/patches/; Dawn and SDL3 have theirs there too.

A scheduled workflow runs update-dusklight.sh every day. If the patches still apply to upstream's newest revision, it commits that revision, so a fresh clone builds against the latest Dusklight the patches fit. If one does not, it commits nothing and opens an issue. It cannot build the game, so a revision it commits is not known to compile or run: the Status table above is for the revision it was tested at (34a144a493).

How it works

  Dusklight (the game's code)                     vendor/dusklight
        |
  Aurora ........ GameCube GX, pads, cards, DVD   vendor/dusklight/extern/aurora
        |              |               |
      Dawn           SDL3             nod
   (WebGPU)     ps5/sdl drivers    ps5/nod: .iso and .ciso
        |
  Vulkan: RADV + PS5 winsys, VK_KHR_display       PS5_Mesa, PS5_Vulkan
        |
  PS5 GPU

• Dawn. The fork Aurora uses already had a console port (Nintendo Switch): a Vulkan driver linked into the program and a native-window surface. ps5/patches/dawn.patch adds the PS5 beside it: RADV's entry point in place of a Vulkan library, and the console's one output as a VK_KHR_display surface.
• SDL3. Threads, time and files are FreeBSD's. ps5/sdl/ adds a video driver (one display, a window that is the screen), an audio driver (AudioOut, 48 kHz stereo) and a joystick driver that presents each controller as a DualSense.
• nod. Aurora reads discs through nod, a Rust library. There is no Rust toolchain for the console, so ps5/nod/nod.cpp implements the part of nod's C API that is called, for plain and CISO GameCube images.
• The console's quirks, each found the hard way and explained where it is handled: constructors that ran in reverse (ps5/tools/cc-init-array.sh), an lstat that does not work for a title and other missing libc functions (ps5/src/shims.c), and where a title may write (ps5/src/startup.c).

Credits

• Dusklight by Twilit Realm and its contributors, on the Twilight Princess decompilation.
• Aurora, Borealis, nod and the Dawn fork by Luke Street (encounter) and contributors.
• PS5_Vulkan, PS5_Mesa, PS5_PayloadSDK and the PS5 Vulkan Template by Mihawk: the driver, the platform layer and the tools this is built with.
• ps5-payload-dev/sdk by John Törnblom.
• Mesa and RADV, Dawn, SDL, and the libraries listed in LICENSING.md.

Licence

See LICENSING.md. In short: the port's own files are MIT or Zlib, one tool is GPL-3.0, and a built title is GPL-3.0 because of what it links. The game itself is Nintendo's and is not part of this.