PSoXide and its games are largely written with agentic coding. I direct the AI coding agents. I decide what gets built, set the rules they work to and review their changes. Then I test the work in two places: PSoXide's emulator, which profiles every cycle, and a real PlayStation, which shows where the emulator is wrong.
What I do
The agents don't pick the projects, the architecture or the priorities. I do, and I set the rules in the next section. Nothing lands without my review, commit messages included.
The emulator replays a bug the same way every time, which a console can't. When the two disagree, the console wins and I fix the emulator to match: its CD timing and its MDEC transfer speed both come from measurements on my own consoles.
The rules the agents work to
- Provenance. Where behaviour comes from public hardware documentation, console measurements or another project, the provenance records say so, and known derivations are credited in the source. I don't claim that the whole project is clean-room. An AI model is trained on existing code, so AI-written code can carry influences that nobody can fully audit.
- 32-bit integer code on the console. Code that runs on the PlayStation uses fixed-point arithmetic and bounded memory, because the console has no floating-point unit.
- No visual trade-offs for speed without approval. The agents don't cut draw distance, detail or effects to reach a frame rate unless I have seen before and after frames and agreed.
- Plain commit messages. A commit message describes the change. AI authorship is disclosed here, in each project's README and on each release page, and not in commit trailers.
What every change has to pass
The checks differ by project. Each project runs some or all of these:
- Emulator tests. The emulator core has its own test suite, and it runs the public ps1-tests cases (58 of 61 self-checking cases pass, and that number is a gate).
- A 20-game compatibility run. The emulator boots 20 commercial titles without a BIOS, and a change that alters the recorded display hashes needs an explanation. All 20 reach the in-game tier in headless runs. No person has played them through and rated them playable yet. The comparison page lists the results in its compatibility section.
- Frame, hash and state comparisons. The same inputs replayed before and after a change must produce the same game state. Where a change is meant to alter the picture, I compare frames.
- Comparison with the original game. For ports and rebuilds, behaviour is checked against the original: every Celeste room and Celeste 2 level against the PICO-8 carts, Half-Life against the Xash3D engine as a behavioural reference, and WipEout against ship traces recorded from its own disc.
- Build gates for the console's limits. A stack-depth check proves that the scratchpad call trees fit, a link-map scan flags 64-bit helper calls, and a game that outgrows the console's RAM does not link.
- Console tests. Hardware tests run on my own consoles, with results captured and compared with the emulator. The development methodology shows one measured example.
A passing check is evidence for the workload it ran. Some releases go out tested in the emulator only, and their changelogs say so.
Where the provenance records live
- Legal & licensing: provenance covers the whole project.
- SDK: asset provenance, downstream licensing and the licence audit.
- Emulator: PROVENANCE.md and the HLE provenance record.
- Games: Quake, Half-Life, PSoXide Arcade, VoXide and the editor's asset provenance for Cortex Ignition.
What the AI generated, project by project
Every project's README and itch.io page carries an "AI-generated content" line that says what ships to players: code, art and textures, sound and music, text.
| Project | AI-generated content that ships |
|---|---|
| SDK, emulator, editor, engine | Code. The editor repository also holds two placeholder character models made with an AI 3D-model generator, used by an engine example. |
| Cortex Ignition | Code, most level textures and the sky (made with an image model, then reduced to 64 by 64 PS1 textures) and some animation clips (generated with a motion model, then edited). The 3D art is by Alberto Busicchio and the music by Carmelo Miceli, both credited in the game. The voice and effect recordings come from asset packs. |
| VoXide, NitroXide, Celeste Classic Collection, Quake, PSXcel, PSoXide Arcade, the demo disc | Code only. Everything else is third-party or the original creators', credited in each project's README and in the game. |
| Half-Life, Hollow Knight | Code only. The build converts game data from your own copy, and the projects distribute none of it. |
| WipEout | Code, and a remastered texture pack that an image model generated from the original textures. |
Corrections
If you think a claim here is wrong, a provenance record is missing or a game isn't doing what its page says, open an issue. Say which page or file you mean and what you found. The contact process in the legal notice has the details.