griches--PS5_Sunshine/README.md

Super Mario Sunshine for PlayStation 5

A PS5 homebrew port of sms-pc-port, the native PC port of Super Mario Sunshine by chasem-dev.

All of the hard work here is chasem-dev's

sms-pc-port is what makes this possible: a complete, native port of the GameCube game, with its own platform, sound, input and graphics layers, 60 and 120 frames a second, widescreen, texture packs and a great deal more, built on the decompilation it carries. This repository adds only what a PS5 needs on top of it: a patch of about 1,000 lines, the console's drivers and a build recipe. If you enjoy this, the thanks belong there. Please star and support chasem-dev/sms-pc-port.

The game runs natively on the console, at 3840x2160 and 60 frames a second, drawn with OpenGL through the PS5 OpenGL SDK (Mesa over the console's own GPU interface).

It needs a PS5 that already runs homebrew, and your own disc image of the game (North America, GMSE01): the title is compiled from the decompilation and reads everything else (models, levels, sound, movies) from your disc. No game data, Nintendo artwork, Sony software or keys are included.

This is an unofficial port. It is not part of sms-pc-port and is not supported by it: please do not take PS5 problems to chasem-dev. Report them here.

This is an early release: 0.10.0

It is not fully tested. It was brought up and played on one console over a single day (2026-10-13), through the opening, Delfino Plaza and the first episode of Bianco Hills. Everything after that is unplayed on a PS5. Expect faults; several serious ones were found and fixed only by playing, and there will be more further into the game. Keep a copy of your save.

New in 0.10.0: a ready-made title (copy it over and add your disc), and the HD texture pack goes in as its authors publish it, with the console sizing its largest images itself.

Installing

You need a PS5 that runs homebrew, with etaHEN (or an equivalent), ShadowMountPlus (which shows folders in /data/homebrew as games) and an FTP server, and your own disc image of the North American release (GMSE01, revision 0) as .iso, .gcm or Dolphin's .ciso. Other regions are not supported.

1. Download Sunshine-PS5-v<version>.zip from the releases page and unzip it.
2. With an FTP program (FileZilla, Cyberduck, WinSCP), copy the whole PPSA99312 folder into /data/homebrew/ on the console.
3. Copy your disc image into that folder, beside eboot.bin:

/data/homebrew/PPSA99312/eboot.bin
/data/homebrew/PPSA99312/sce_sys/
/data/homebrew/PPSA99312/sce_module/
/data/homebrew/PPSA99312/res/
/data/homebrew/PPSA99312/licenses/
/data/homebrew/PPSA99312/GMSE01.iso        (your disc image; any name)

"Super Mario Sunshine" appears on the home screen. If it does not, check the folder is exactly /data/homebrew/PPSA99312/ with eboot.bin directly inside it (not PPSA99312/PPSA99312/), and that ShadowMountPlus is running. If it starts and closes at once, the disc image is missing or is not the North American one.

To update, copy the new release's PPSA99312 folder over the old one. Your saves, settings, disc image and texture packs are left alone.

Playing

DualSense	In the game
Cross	A (jump, confirm)
Circle	B (dive, back)
Square	X
Triangle	Y (first-person view)
R1	Z
L1 + R1	Save state (in a level); in the pause menu, the list of save states to load
L2, R2	L, R (R sprays FLUDD)
Options	Start (pause, map)
Touch pad button	Settings
Sticks, D-pad	as on a GameCube

The prompts the game shows on screen are the DualSense's own.

Settings. Press the touch pad's button at any time. The D-pad moves and changes, Cross steps through a row's choices, Circle or the touch pad closes it.

Row	What it does
Invert FLUDD Aim X / Y	flips the left stick while you aim FLUDD
Invert Camera X / Y	flips the right stick's camera
Camera Shake	OFF, HALF or FULL: the game's earthquakes (off to begin with)
Performance Overlay	OFF, MINIMAL (the frame rate alone) or FULL
Heat Haze	the heat shimmer
Resolution *	960p, 1440p, 1920p or 2160p
Frame Rate *	30 or 60
Picture *	4:3 or 16:9
Smoothing (FXAA) *	on or off

Rows marked * take effect the next time you start the game. Below them are the PC port's cheats (god mode, infinite lives and so on). Saves and settings are kept in /data/homebrew/PPSA99312/userdata/.

Save states. Hold L1 and press R1 in a level to save the moment. Pause (Options) and press L1 + R1 again to see your save states, with a picture of each, and load one. They are kept in userdata/savestates. A state loads exactly only in the release that saved it; with a newer release, older states put Mario back where he was in that level and keep your progress, but the level starts afresh.

HD textures (optional)

The port loads texture packs made for the Dolphin emulator. The one it was tested with is the Super Mario Sunshine UHD Texture Pack (by qashto and razius), with chasem-dev's HD texture extras:

1. Download GMS.7z from the UHD pack's release 2.1.1 and sms-hd-texture-extras-1.1.1.zip from the extras' release 1.1.1.
2. Unpack both on your computer (7-Zip on Windows; a Mac opens the .7z with The Unarchiver or tar -xf GMS.7z).
3. Copy them to the console so that you have:

/data/homebrew/PPSA99312/mods/textures/GMS/                     (the GMS folder from GMS.7z's Textures folder)
/data/homebrew/PPSA99312/mods/textures/sms-hd-texture-extras/   (the extras' zip, unpacked)

The packs are not part of this project and are not stored by it: they belong to their authors.

The first visit to each area is slower. The UHD pack's largest images (4096 to 16384 pixels) are more than the console's graphics driver can hold, so the title halves each one to 2048 pixels or less the first time it is used and keeps the result in userdata/.cache. After that, loads read the small copy. Deleting that folder only means the work is done again.

Status

Tested on one console (PS5, firmware 13.60) on 2026-10-13 and 2026-10-14, with the North American disc (GMSE01, revision 0). "Seen" means it ran there and was watched by a person playing, looked at in the console's own screenshots, or read in the title's log. Nothing else is claimed.

Area	Seen on the console	Not yet verified
Start-up	The logos, the opening movie, the title screen, file select; a saved file loaded	A new game from an empty memory card
Rendering	3840x2160; Delfino Plaza and Bianco Hills episode 1 look right; the plaza's gates show their movie of the level beyond	Everything past Bianco Hills episode 1; a comparison with a GameCube
Frame rate	A locked 60 frames a second (16.7 ms) in the plaza and Bianco Hills, at 2160p, with the HD texture pack	Later, heavier areas; a long session
Loading	Delfino Plaza in about 6 seconds with the HD pack (9 the first time, while its largest images are halved); a "LOADING..." notice during long loads
Input	Walking, jumping, the camera, FLUDD, menus, the DualSense's own button prompts	Every button in play; rumble; a second controller
Settings	The touch pad's menu: inverted FLUDD aim and camera, camera shake, the performance overlay, resolution, frame rate; choices kept across a restart	Every row; the cheats below them
Saving	A save made earlier loads	Saving in play, checked after a restart
Save states	Saving with L1 + R1 in a level, the pause menu's list with pictures, loading a state, and loading after a restart	States across many levels; a state from another build (loads the position only, by design)
The map (R1)	The wipe into it, now quick
Sound	Music, effects and the movies' sound play	A careful listen for faults
Texture packs	The UHD pack and the HD extras as published, their largest images halved on the console (see below)	Other packs
Memory	Two levels and back without running out, with the HD pack at the sizes the console uses	Bianco Hills since the console does the halving itself; many levels in one session

Known problems

• Only the start of the game has been played. Anything from Bianco Hills episode 2 onward is untested on a PS5.
• Camera shake is off to begin with. The game's earthquakes (a boss landing, a building rising) are strong on a large screen. Turn them back on in the settings menu if you want the original feel.
• Save states belong to the release that saved them. L1 + R1 saves one in a level, and loads one from the pause menu (sms-pc-port's own). A state loads exactly only in the release that saved it: in a newer one it puts Mario back where he was and keeps the progress, but the level starts afresh. Keep a copy of your memory card save as well.

What the console needed

For the curious, and for anyone porting something similar. All of it is in ps5/patches/sms-pc-port.patch and ps5/.

• Where the game's memory goes. The game wants its 64 MiB at address 0x80000000, where a PS5 title's C library is loaded. It lives at 0xC0000000 instead, and two places in the game that test addresses against the GameCube's layout had to learn that (one of them silently switched off every material animation, so the plaza's gates never showed their movie).
• Graphics. OpenGL 4.6 from the PS5 OpenGL SDK, through SDL2 with a video driver for the console's EGL. The SDK's runtime is rebuilt with its helper threads on and a larger buffer arena (ps5/opengl/build-runtime.sh).
• Speed. Reading single pixels back from the screen, which the game does every frame, is done through small late copies instead of a full-frame read; full-screen passes are drawn as two triangles, which the driver can batch.
• A leak that only a console shows. A pixel count the game leaves running (while Mario sleeps, for one) took a new GPU query at every pause and never gave them back. On the PS5 that filled the driver's buffer arena and halved the frame rate within minutes. It is bounded now.
• Threads. The game's video decoder runs below its main thread and was starved whenever a frame had no time to spare; the main thread now gives the others a turn.
• Save states. sms-pc-port finds the game's global variables for a state in the link map after linking. The console's title is linked by lld and loaded at an address of its own choosing, so the map is read with lld's layout and the ranges are written at link addresses, which the game slides by where it was loaded.
• The console's own menu. The touch pad's button opens settings a PS5 has no keyboard or launcher for.

Building it yourself

The port is built on Linux (an arm64 or x86-64 machine or VM) with LLVM 22, PS5_PayloadSDK, PS5_Vulkan (for its link recipe and tools; no Vulkan driver is linked) and the PS5 OpenGL SDK 1.0.2.

git clone https://github.com/griches/PS5_Sunshine.git && cd PS5_Sunshine
git clone https://github.com/chasem-dev/sms-pc-port.git vendor/sms-pc-port
git -C vendor/sms-pc-port checkout c8fb4a3e81a2176588574395302ecf862f9a440a   # the revision SOURCE.txt names
git -C vendor/sms-pc-port submodule update --init decomp
export PS5_VULKAN_DIR=/path/to/PS5_Vulkan PS5_OPENGL_PREFIX=/path/to/ps5-opengl-sdk/sdk
ps5/tools/build.sh             # applies the patch, builds dist/PPSA99312/
ps5/tools/package-release.sh   # the release archive, dist/Sunshine-PS5-v<version>.zip

ps5/tools/setup-source.sh --save writes changes made under vendor/sms-pc-port back to the patch.

Credits

• chasem-dev, for sms-pc-port and the decompilation it builds, and for the HD texture extras. This port is theirs with a console's worth of glue.
• BlackBearReloaded, for the PS5 OpenGL SDK.
• Mihawk, for PS5_Vulkan, PS5_PayloadSDK and the PS5 Vulkan Template this port's platform layer comes from.
• qashto and razius, for the Super Mario Sunshine UHD Texture Pack.
• The SDL and Mesa projects, and Kenney for the button prompt artwork.

Licence

GPL-3.0 as built; each part keeps its own licence. LICENSING.md says which covers what, and what is not covered at all: the game, texture packs and trademarks.

Super Mario Sunshine is Nintendo's. This project is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by Nintendo or Sony Interactive Entertainment.