SharpEmu Demo

A small Breakout game for the PS5, built as a single self-contained ELF.

It needs no data files. The font, graphics and game logic are all in the source. The game draws on the CPU into a 480x270 buffer and scales it 4x into a 1920x1080 tiled VideoOut buffer.

Controls

When nobody is playing, the game plays itself.

Action	Controller	SharpEmu keyboard
Start / launch the ball	Cross	Z or Enter
Move the paddle	Left stick or D-pad	Arrow keys or A/D
Back to the demo screen	Options	Tab

Layout

Path	Contents
src/game.c, src/game.h	Game logic and drawing, with no platform code
src/main.c	PS5 entry point, VideoOut, pad input and timing
static/	Metadata, icons and background, copied into sce_sys/
build.py	Builds the app folder

Building

The build needs Python 3, ps5-payload-sdk (v0.43) and LLVM 18 or newer. It does not use the SDK's libc or startup files, so the ELF only imports libkernel, libSceVideoOut, libSceSystemService, libSceUserService and libScePad.

The build marks the ELF header with the PS5 OSABI (9) and ABI version (2), so SharpEmu detects it as PS5. The output remains a plain ELF, not a SELF container.

Imports use the NIDs from SharpEmu's export catalog. The build generates temporary link-only stubs with the original library names; these are not included in the app folder. Source code still calls the readable function names, but eboot.bin imports NIDs, so no plain-symbol support is needed in the emulator.

export PS5_PAYLOAD_SDK=/opt/ps5-payload-sdk
python3 build.py /path/to/sharpemu-demo

The output folder must be outside the repository. SharpEmu opens it like a game dump:

sharpemu-demo/
  eboot.bin
  sce_sys/
    param.json
    icon0.png
    pic0.png

CI

Every push and pull request builds the app folder and uploads it as the sharpemu-demo artifact. Every push to the default branch also publishes a release tagged with the short commit hash, with sharpemu-demo.zip attached. SharpEmu downloads that zip during its build.

License

Code: GPL-2.0-or-later. See LICENSE.