Balatro on AnyPS5

Screenshots

No screenshot of this game running has been posted in the project's threads yet. Testers who reach a new screen usually post one in the discussion linked on the right.

Where it stands

Balatro is playable on Windows. The early bring-up needed local patches, but a later tester ran plain current main (commit 4a747c48) on an RTX 5070 Ti and played about 10 minutes of full gameplay at roughly 60 frames per second. They saw no lag, no errors or aborts, no garbled draws, black frames or flicker, and working audio.

Getting there took a chain of fixes, all merged. The sound-effect system needed support for the game's 16-bit WAV files and for streaming its music. The game also needed a stereo-to-surround mix and a fix to the clean-up at exit. On the graphics side the game used to crash 8 to 10 seconds in because it overwrote lists of graphics commands the GPU thread had not yet read. Reading those lists earlier and making a flip wait until the frame was drawn fixed that. The tester who confirmed it says an older checkout stopped on a depth clear instruction, and updating main got past it.

On macOS one tester reported about 33 fps on an M1 Pro with MoltenVK after a local workaround for the same overwrite problem, which was before the current main fixes. On Linux a contributor traced the game and checked its internal frame waits, and another fix for building the Linux executable was proposed but closed. There is no clear Linux play report for the game.

The only open item in the threads is a discussion of how many frames the game may run ahead of the GPU. The tester's report on current main suggests the problem no longer shows up.

What is stopping it

• Open question about how many frames the game may run ahead of the GPU. The crash and flicker it caused look fixed by later merged work, but the issue is still open. Thread

How it got here

1. 6 Oct 2026Merged: the VR controller functions the game imports are declared so start-up no longer fails on them. Source
2. 7 Oct 2026Merged: sound effects now load. The game's 80 WAV files are read as 16-bit audio. Source
3. 7 Oct 2026Merged: a stereo voice can be mixed into the surround output, which stopped the game about 5 seconds in. Source
4. 7 Oct 2026Reported: Balatro runs on Windows for about 8-10 seconds, then crashes because the game overwrites graphics command lists before the GPU reads them. Source
5. 7 Oct 2026Bring-up write-up by TideOPL: boots, reaches the menu and plays with music at a steady 60 fps on Windows with local patches. Source
6. 8 Oct 2026Merged: music streaming works, and graphics command lists are now read when submitted, which ends the crash. Source
7. 10 Oct 2026Confirmed on macOS (M1 Pro, MoltenVK): limiting pending frames fixes the overwrite and runs at about 33 fps. Source
8. 10 Oct 2026Confirmed on current Windows main: full gameplay at about 60 fps, with no garbled draws or errors in a 10-minute test. Source

Tested hardware