Green Hat Boy

Emulator test builds, patches and test logs for a jailbroken base PS5. Bring your own game.
This repository is emulator work and test logs. It is not the game and does not contain or link to it.

Made by Vampinity, together with GrowingBlackBeans and waveydude

_{Built on viejunerd's EglantinePS5 NUP build, heydemoura's EglantinePS5 and the Eglantine emulator core.}

_{Is there a download? · What to expect · How fast · What works · Talk and report · Who makes this}

Important

Unofficial and experimental. No game is included here, and none is linked. This repository holds no game files, no keys and no firmware. You need your own legally obtained copy of the game. Shader caches and saves are made on your own console and are never shared here. "Green Hat Boy" is this project's own name; it is not from or endorsed by the game's maker. Expect crashes and save often. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Nintendo, Sony, the Eglantine team or the Eden team; please send problems with these builds here, not to them. It is free, and it is not for sale.

Is there a download?

Not for newcomers yet. The game starts, the opening plays and the first village is playable. But on a fresh install the very first start still crashes on the way there about half the time, even with the best settings we have, and we do not want your first try to end like that. Starting again gets in: with the best settings, every second and third start in our tests reached the village.

• Test builds are shared directly with people who already help test. There is no public download here.
• The first alpha (an early test version) comes when a fresh install gets through its first start and into the first village without crashing on the way. We test exactly that on a real console, and the result goes on this page. No date until it passes.

Progress so far

Each build is tried on a real console before it goes up.

What to expect when the alpha is out

We would rather tell you now than have you find out on your own.

• It can crash, most of all on the very first start. On a fresh install the screen stays black for between about 45 seconds and a minute and a half after the opening movie. That is normal, so wait. After that, the first start crashes about half the time in its first ten minutes, most often at the house door: 4 of 9 first starts reached the village in our tests with the best settings.
• If it crashes, start it again. From the second start on, the door is no problem: with the best settings, 16 of 16 starts got through it in our tests. If it keeps crashing at the same spot, tell us with the crash form (see below).
• The game saves by itself, and often. It does so as you walk and each time you go through a door. After a crash, choose Continue and you are back close to where you were. One thing to know: New Game overwrites that autosave. The game asks before it does.
• Why a restart helps: the first time you see a scene, the emulator has to build the small drawing programs for it. That takes time and memory. It keeps them on the PS5, so the next start can skip that work. For now the first start after an update counts as a first start too.
• The opening stutters the first time you watch it, and the sound can drop out for a moment. From the second start it plays nearly smooth.
• Short freezes the first time you see a place, about a second each. Walk the same way again and they are gone.
• Wide open areas are the slow ones. Indoors and on narrow paths it runs much faster; see How fast it runs.
• Later in the game it can still crash when memory runs out. That happens most in wide open areas and just after you move into a new one. Save before you move on.

How fast it runs

It depends on how much is on screen. Closed-in places run fast. Wide open areas with many trees, water and other objects run slower.

Measured on 11 November on a base PS5, firmware 12.40, docked, full resolution, with the fast settings of that day, on test build T120. That was before the guard against jumping icons was added to the fast settings; the guard costs about 3%, so expect a little less now. The clean settings are a little slower: about 16 fps (frames per second) on the walk from Link's house into the village, against about 17 to 19 with the fast settings on the same walk. Wide open areas are where the speed work is going next.

What works, what is fixed, what is being improved

Works well, on a base PS5 (as of 12 November 2026)

• Made for the base PS5 and tested on one every day (firmware 12.40, and 13.60 on GrowingBlackBeans' and waveydude's consoles; waveydude also tries 9.40).
• The game's full docked resolution. Nothing is scaled down to gain speed.
• A clean picture with the default settings: no full-screen flashes, no white fog, and the leaves, ferns and grass are all drawn.
• A ready-made PS5 app. Copy it over and start; there is no PC build step and no Linux to boot.
• Indoor areas and narrow paths, at the speeds shown above.

Fixed since the first test

• The white fog over everything, and the bare trees: the forest looks as it should.
• Dark full-screen flashes in the default settings.
• The black screen and crash on the very first start. With two settings, 3 of 3 first starts got past it in our tests on 12 November, against 0 of 3 without. The two settings are not on by default yet.
• The crash at the house door, from the second start on. With the test settings, which build drawing programs on two threads instead of eight (on one in one test group), 16 of 16 second and third starts on a fresh install got through the door and into the village in our tests on 12 November. These settings are not on by default yet, and the very first start is not fixed (see below).
• The choppy movie behind the title screen. Two settings cut the movie frames that were thrown away from over 650 to under 90, in both test starts on 12 November. They are not on by default yet either.
• Icons and hearts jumping to the wrong place in the fast settings. A guard removes that; standing in the village it costs about 3% speed.
• Freezes the first time a place is seen are shorter: about a second at most, where it was about four.
• The opening movies were badly out of sync. They are much better now, not perfect yet.

Being improved right now

• The very first start on a fresh install. This is what holds the alpha back. From the second start on the house door is solved: with the best settings, 16 of 16 starts got through it in our tests. A true first start still crashes in its first ten minutes about half the time: with the best settings, 4 of 9 reached the village on 12 November. Starting again gets in. The cause: on a first start about 40 new drawing programs are built at once at the door, and that makes a wave of memory use of half a gigabyte or more in a few seconds. No setting we tried stops that wave. A first fix (building fewer at once) was written, but two reviews showed it would not make the wave smaller. The next build measures which part of the emulator takes that memory; the fix follows from that.
• Crashes after long play. We know the cause, and the fix is being tested.
• Speed in wide open areas. The more objects there are on screen, the slower it runs. The limit there is the emulator's own work for each object, not the PS5's graphics chip.
• The opening the first time you watch it: stutter, and a white flash on one camera cut.
• A short stutter on the title screen at the moment the logo comes up.

For testers: how to install a tester build

These steps are for people who help test. If you are new here, please wait for the alpha; it comes with a fuller guide.

What you need

A jailbroken PS5	Base model, firmware 12.x or 13.x (tested on 12.40 and 13.60). PS5 Pro is not tested. This page does not explain jailbreaking.
ShadowMountPlus 1.7beta4 or newer	Runs with your jailbreak and puts homebrew apps on the home screen.
A USB drive	Formatted as exFAT, with room for the game (about 25 GB). FTP or a file manager app on the PS5 work too.
Your own game and files	Your own legally obtained game and the files the app asks for, from your own console. None of these are included or linked here, and this page does not explain how to get them.

Steps

1. Get the build from the tester who sent it to you.
2. Unzip it. Inside are a folder PPSA98515 (the app), the settings files, LICENSE and the build's notes.
3. Put it on the USB drive. On the drive, make a folder called homebrew and put the whole PPSA98515 folder in it. Then make a second folder for your own files, for example eglantine, with three folders inside it: keys, firmware and roms. Put your own files in the folder the app names for each.
4. Plug the drive into the PS5 with your jailbreak running. A tile called EglantinePS5 appears on the home screen. No tile? Restart the PS5 and run your jailbreak again.
5. Tell the app where your files are. Open EglantinePS5, go to Settings > Game files, browse to the eglantine folder on the USB drive and select it. Close the app and open it again.
6. Play. Open Library, pick the game and choose New Game. If the app says Setup required, a file from step 3 is missing or in the wrong folder.
7. To stop, save in the game first, then press Touchpad + L1 together. Quitting this way also keeps the graphics the app prepared, so the next start is smoother.

The notes of each tester build say which settings file is for what, and what changed.

Where to talk, and how to report a problem

Discussions is the place for questions, your results and anything else.

For a crash or a glitch, open an issue and pick a form: Crash or glitch, or Send a run log. The form asks for:

• Base PS5 or Pro, and your PS5 firmware (Settings > System > System Software > Console Information).
• Which build and which settings file you use.
• Where in the game it happened, and what you saw.
• For a crash: the newest crash-*.txt from /data/eglantineps5/logs/ and the crash-*-eden_log.txt with the same time next to it. No crash file? Attach /data/eglantineps5/user/log/eden_log.txt.

Note

A log attached to an issue is public. Before you attach one, delete the two lines that contain EDEN_PAD_OPEN and EDEN_PAD_USERS (they hold your console's user number) and anything with your own folder names in it. Or let the tool do it: python3 tools/pack-run.py <folder with the log> --out . removes them and packs the run.

The log pool

Every test run of this project is kept in runs/, one folder per run with the log, the settings and a short summary, and index.csv lists them all, one row per run. If you test often and want to add your runs yourself, ask in Discussions; how to pack a run is in runs/README.md.

Who makes this

Three of us are in this together: Vampinity, GrowingBlackBeans and waveydude.

Vampinity · started and runs the project

Builds every version, tests it on a real base PS5 and writes the fixes that come out of that. From 5 to 12 November, in numbers (counted on the morning of 12 November):

88 hours	of PS5 time in automated test batches
1,210	test runs, in 340 batches
71 hours	of recorded picture checked frame by frame, about 15 million frames
133	test builds
498	patches in the newest build: own work and ports of other people's work
515	switches, own and ported, each tracked in a ledger with the runs that used it

He built the test bench that runs by itself on a real PS5: it starts the game, plays a set walk, records the picture and checks every frame for flashes and stutter. With it he found what causes the flashes in the fast settings and built a guard against them, cut the short freezes in play from over 4 seconds to about 1, and proved the fix that took the dark flashes out of the default settings. On 12 November he found why a fresh install crashed on its very first start and got past that point with two settings, and made the movie behind the title screen play smoothly. He also measured what holds the wide open areas back and where the memory runs out, which is where the work goes next.

GrowingBlackBeans · collaborator

The project's second developer. Since 7 November, in numbers:

148	test runs on firmware 13.60, about 4 hours of play
18	patches on top of T120, one of them a port of a Lichii fix, all meant to be off unless their switch is set
15	dev builds of his own

Among other things he wrote the fix that makes the fast settings possible, made each session build on the last one (on for everyone), found two freezes and the cause of the long hitches while walking, and wrote the log toolkit that reads every run here. He tests everything on firmware 13.60, which we cannot. A good part of how far this has come is thanks to him.

waveydude · collaborator

He started as a tester and now also writes fixes for the build. In numbers:

6	runs shared as full logs on 11 November: four sessions on 13.60, about 88 minutes in all, and two starts on 9.40
6	commits of memory fixes, in every build since T113
3	crash fixes from his own play, in T130 and later

Most of his fixes are for memory and crashes: how the emulator's own memory store hands out large pieces, a graphics driver that asks for memory before it gives up, and the crashes that ended his own sessions. He tests on two base PS5s and plays much further into the game than our test routes go. His logs have pointed us to bugs of our own more than once.

Built on the work of

viejunerd, heydemoura, the Eglantine and Eden teams, Frizti (Fritchii), zortos293 and the Lichii contributors, Duck912, mihawk-99, exploitizm and notquiteog, among others.

Most of the new code is written with Claude. Who did what, in full: CREDITS.md.

Licence

GPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE. The source of each build is published with it.

Nintendo Switch 2 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time are trademarks of Nintendo. PlayStation and PS5 are trademarks of Sony Interactive Entertainment. They are named here only to say what this project runs and what it runs on. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Nintendo, Sony, the Eglantine team or the Eden team. No games, keys or firmware are included or linked.