About PSoXide | PSoXide

What PSoXide is for

What if we never stopped developing for the original PlayStation?

Late in a console's commercial life, developers have had years to learn its hardware. I want to see what happens when that learning continues: new games, shared tools and further experiments on the same machine.

I'm Manny, the developer behind Bonnie Studios. PSoXide has three strands:

Create: brand-new PS1 games using modern software engineering practices.
Port: games brought to the console that were never released on it.
Optimize: existing PS1 games reimplemented by rewriting their original source for greater efficiency.

The Rust SDK, engine, editor and emulator support this work, and each project leaves something behind for the next. The Quake port's level format, collision and BSP renderer became the engine's shared psx-bsp crate, and Cortex Ignition's levels run on it. Quake's present queue, which hands finished frames to the GPU on the vertical blank, moved into the SDK the same way, and Quake now uses the shared version. In a Cortex Ignition stress test with one enemy it raised the frame rate from 19.8 to 25 fps. It isn't switched on in Cortex yet.

PSoXide builds on the work and knowledge shared by the PlayStation homebrew community. The projects page records what you can play or build today, alongside experiments that are still in development.

Reimplementing existing games

Porting or rewriting a game does not remove the rights in its original code or content. These projects require a suitable licence, permission or another applicable legal basis. PSoXide’s own licence grants no rights to third-party games. See Legal & licensing.

The Optimize strand rewrites an existing PS1 game's source into a more efficient implementation for the same hardware, to learn what a different implementation can achieve. Changes to behaviour and presentation are recorded alongside performance and memory measurements.

The first project in this strand, WipEout, is in progress: the 1995 PlayStation game rebuilt for the same console, labelled "Rebuilt with PSoXide". Nothing is released yet, and any result will need a comparison against the original on equivalent scenes and hardware.

How the work is developed

The tools support a repeatable cycle: build, run, inspect and test. Command-line workflows and emulator debugging interfaces also let developers work with coding assistants. The development workflow explains how to connect these steps. The development methodology shows how measurements from real consoles improve the emulator and SDK.

PSoXide is largely written with agentic coding. I direct the architecture, review and integrate changes, and validate results with automated tests and original-hardware checks. How PSoXide is built lists the rules the agents work to and the checks every change passes. The provenance disclosure covers the project's use of AI assistance and how provenance is tracked.

Hardware testing. Emulator checks complement testing on original hardware; they don't replace it. When the emulator and a real PlayStation disagree, the PlayStation is right.
Recorded measurements. The comparison page ties its figures to recorded builds, explains the limits of the benchmark and separates measured results from work still in progress.
Firmware and game data. PSoXide doesn't need Sony's BIOS and can't load one. It doesn't distribute commercial disc images. Half-Life and Hollow Knight require your own game data; Quake uses the shareware episode's data. See project-specific terms.
Source and provenance. The SDK, emulator and editor source is public under GPL-2.0-or-later, with provenance written down. Some experiments have no public release yet.