u/izzy88izzy

Hey guys, just wanted to show some progress.

Some of you might have seen the Celeste Classic collection I put out last month. It unexpectedly got picked up way outside the PS1 dev scene due to the AI connection and shared on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, even a couple of journalists got in touch.

I wanted to share this update more privately to the ps1 dev community since there is still far too much to fix for a proper release. But I wanted to give this sub an early preview, because you lot will actually know what you are looking at.

So: Half-Life, running on a real SCPH-9002. Not an emulator. It is rough at 10-15 fps, a long list of visual glitches, gameplay bugs I have not even catalogued yet. But it boots, it runs, and it is surprisingly playable with modern analog controls. Lots of creative techniques were required to even fit all enemies/weapons/animations in RAM, that and CPU are by far the biggest bottleneck and I'm still working on polishing it all.

It runs on PSoXide, a PS1 dev suite I have been building in Rust: emulator, SDK, engine, editor. The Celeste ports showed it could do 2D, this is the first real test of what the SDK can do with a 3D game this size, and honestly that is the thing I am displaying, more than Half-Life itself, having a tight integration between SDK and emulator allows me to push optimization quite hard, I've also improved the emulator considerably since it had to pick up real-hardware discrepancies at cycle-level other emulators (understandably) don't need to model.

The port will be open sourced but just not yet, I want it in a more mature state first. And there will never be a disc to download, you will need Half-Life installed on Steam and Rust to run the converter, which builds the image from your own copy.

PSoXide itself is already public if you want to poke at it: https://github.com/EBonura/PSoXide

Happy to answer anything.

Hi everyone 👋

A while back I ported Celeste to the PS1. That port leaned on PSn00bSDK and ccleste (the C translation of the Lua source), and while it was a nice little achievement, it had some visual bugs and the sound wasn't great. Since then I've been pouring my time into building my own PlayStation 1 SDK in Rust, PSoXide, and I really wanted to see how far I could push it on real hardware.

So I went back and rebuilt both PICO-8 Celeste games, the original and Celeste 2: Lani's Trek, this time completely from scratch, written straight from the Lua originals, in Rust on PSoXide. Honestly, I still get a little giddy every time it boots on an actual console.

Both run natively on a real PlayStation 1 at 60 fps. I also added a cover-art launcher and plenty of options: music/SFX volume, 1x/2x scale, swappable border gradients, and a free-fly mode.

And now I'd love to keep going. I'm thinking of eventually turning this into a proper PICO-8-on-PS1 collection. I'll probably start with my own two PICO-8 games, Cortex Override and Horizon Glide, since I know them best, but there are so many other wonderful little carts that would feel right at home on a PlayStation disc. What do you think I should add?

Oh, and PSoXide isn't just for PICO-8 ports: I'm also using it to build a 3D souls-like. I'll share more about that project in the future 👀

Play it / source:

• itch: https://bonnie-studios.itch.io/celeste-classic-collection-psx
• Source: https://github.com/EBonura/pico8-psx
• PSoXide SDK: https://github.com/EBonura/PSoXide

Find me:

• X: https://x.com/_bonniestudios
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/izzy88izzy/
• Buy me a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/bonniegames

Hey everyone!

Something different this time. I went back to the very first PICO-8 game I ever made almost 2 years ago, Cortex Override, and rebuilt it almost from scratch now that I've got more experience and better tools. What's new:

• better lighting engine
• bigger levels
• an overcharge system: grab a data shard and your weapons get supercharged for a few seconds (more pellets, extra missiles, instant plasma)
• browser autosave, so you can close the tab and come back later
• faster, nastier enemies and a reworked economy
• rewritten intro and mission briefings
• lot of polish and bug fixing
• and it all still fits in the 8192 single cart token limit, which was half the fun

Play it free in the browser: https://bonnie-studios.itch.io/cortex-override

If you like it, I made another PICO-8 game too, Horizon Glide: https://bonnie-studios.itch.io/horizon-glide

Side note: I've been recently messing with the PlayStation 1, I've already ported Celeste 1 to PS1 with the PSNoob SDK, but I recently rewrote that port in Rust on my own SDK, PSoXide, to see how far I could push it, and bundled Celeste 1 and 2 onto a single burnable disc. It needs a bit more work but it's coming soon, I'll be sure to post it here once ready. I've been also chipping away at PSoXide's PICO-8 compatibility, the dream is a PICO-8 PS1 disc packed with games one day, and my own two are probably next in line.

Links:

• Cortex Override: https://bonnie-studios.itch.io/cortex-override
• Horizon Glide: https://bonnie-studios.itch.io/horizon-glide
• Source: https://github.com/EBonura/CortexOverride
• All my projects: https://bonnie-studios.itch.io/
• X: https://x.com/_bonniestudios
• Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/bonniegames

Thanks! Hope you enjoy the revamped game!

Quick update on PSoXide, my all-Rust stack for making real PS1 games (emulator, SDK, engine and editor in one). The video shows the latest, including a Sims-like world-building workflow I failed to showcase in my last post. A few things that landed recently:

• Sound and CD audio streaming working
• A new 2D scene editor for building and editing 2D scenes, which I used to make the menu
• Improved room CD streaming, so the world streams in seamlessly (going for an open-world feel)
• Vertical stacked rooms, so the world can go up and down too (not shown in the video yet)
• Better performance and a lot of UI polish

Slowly but surely it's coming together. I've also hired a 3D artist for modeling and animation, and a composer for music and SFX.

A lot of comments asked about using PSoXide for their own games. I'd genuinely be honored, but it'll be a while before I can honestly recommend it for that. My main focus right now is supporting the souls-like, with more general-purpose features coming later. If you want to build your own PS1 game today, I'd strongly recommend the amazing PSXSplash for Unity instead: https://psxsplash.github.io/

I also just started an X account, my last video got reposted there and unexpectedly caught a lot of views, so I'll post updates there too. https://x.com/_bonniestudios

I also feel I should have been more upfront about this in my last post, and I apologise for that: the engineering side here is built with heavy AI assistance, for writing code, digesting hardware docs, and working through specs. It lets me build at a scale I couldn't realistically reach solo. I try to use AI fairly and responsibly, and I've made a point of crediting every source and reference I've built on. I understand this might rub some people the wrong way, but I'd rather be honest about it than hide it. The player model right now is also an AI-generated model made & animated with Meshy, but that's gonna go away soon, is just a placeholder until the 3D artist I hired delivers the first drafts.

I apologise for the frequent posting about this project, but this was too silly not to share. I made a tiny PS1 homebrew demo for my friends’ band, magikAAAAArp, burned it to a real CD-R, put it into an actual PlayStation, reset the console, and it booted.

The game is a cursed Pong variant where the ball is a rotating textured cube, and one of the band’s song streams as proper CD audio. The best part for me is that this wasn’t just built with the PSoXide SDK: the BIN/CUE was also generated by the tool, and the CD was burned directly from PSoXide too.

So this ended up being a pretty funny end-to-end test of the whole toolchain: write game in my custom SDK → build PS1 executable → generate disc image → burn CD-R → boot on original hardware → stream CD audio.

PSoXide is here: https://github.com/EBonura/PSoXide

magikAAAAArp, my friends’ band: https://www.youtube.com/@magikAAAAArp, worth a listen.

More stupid PS1 experiments to come.

Hey everyone, I want to thank you all from the bottom of my heart for the amazing response to my first video, I’ve kept working on the project and wanted to share a more complete (and better recorded) overview of what PSoXide is becoming: an all-in-one PS1 development environment with an emulator, SDK, runtime engine, and editor built together around the game I’m making.

To be completely clear, this is NOT a PS1-like game. It’s a development environment for creating a real PS1 game that runs on original hardware, but with the conveniences of modern game dev environments, a modern and performant language, and a vertically integrated toolchain.

There’s still a lot to do, and there’s also a lot already working that isn’t quite in a state I’m comfortable showing yet, but I hope you enjoy this snippet.

For anyone interested, the project is open source here: https://github.com/EBonura/PSoXide

Happy to answer any question

Your character be like “oh s*** here we go again”