r/psx_homebrew

I've recently come across a creator called 2009aero, who has been making experimental recreations of modern games on retro hardware.

In just a few months, he's shown PS1 projects based on:

• Minecraft
• GTA V
• Skyrim
• Elden Ring
• Final Fantasy X
• God of War
• Oblivion

He's also experimented with N64 projects such as GTA San Andreas and Dark Souls, and previously attempted to bring Pokémon Red to TempleOS using HolyC.

Here's the interesting part: none of these PS1 projects appear to be publicly playable or open source. They're essentially demonstrations showing what these games could look like running on hardware that was never designed for them.

And this seems to have created a bit of a divide.

For regular gamers, these projects are pretty amazing (see YT comments). Seeing something like GTA V or Elden Ring recreated on a PS1 is obviously impressive and makes for a great video.

But some people in the PS1 homebrew community (psxdev discord) have a very different view. I've seen the argument that these are essentially showcase projects: they're designed to demonstrate an impressive result and attract attention, but there's no released game, source code or technology for other developers to actually experiment with.

The sheer speed is also interesting. Seven different PS1 projects in around three months is a lot, especially considering the technical limitations involved in developing for the original hardware. Although 2009aero hasn't publicly explained how much AI is involved in the development process, so it's impossible to know how much AI, if any, was used.

Sapika_08 wrote our first feature for PSX Homebrew Games looking into 2009aero, his projects and this divide between the general gaming audience and the homebrew community:

GTA V, Skyrim and Final Fantasy X on PS1?

So I'm curious what do you think:

Are these projects valuable technical experiments even if they never become playable games?

Or is a PS1 homebrew project only really interesting to the scene if people can download it, study it and build upon it?

Hey folks, sharing here a project I've been working on called Grandleon. It serves as an engine to create games similar to Fire Emblem, with a web editor to create the campaign with maps, units, cut scenes, etc.
It's still at fairly early stages, but I wanted to share and see if folks had any feedback. Issues, comments, contributions, etc. are all appreciated. Right now it can build a N64 rom as well as a PS1 disc, and the idea is to keep it multiplatform and possibly extend in the future. Including improvements to graphics (README has a few screenshots/animations, you can check out).
There's a sample game on the github page in the releases section if you want to test it out as well.

Hi everyone, back again with the next one.

This is NitroXide, a rocket-car football game I wrote for the original PlayStation. It's an original game, no Psyonix code or assets, it just borrows the shape of the genre. The video is recorded from a real SCPH-9002, from a disc I burned.

Like VoXide, it started as a stress test for PSoXide, the PlayStation development environment I've been building while working toward an original PS1 souls-like. Car physics turned out to be a good one: the sim is tuned against Rocket League's published field values, converted to integer fixed-point because the PS1 has no floating-point unit, and it runs entirely on the host in tests so the game feel could be tuned without a console in the loop.

You can play against the CPU, or if a second controller answers it becomes split-screen versus. There's a practice mode with the opponent parked. Boost, jump, dodge and air roll are all in, one button doubles as powerslide on the ground and air roll in the air, and matches run in daylight, at sunset or under floodlights. The soundtrack streams off the disc as real CD audio, four tracks by Just Music, used with permission.

It's an early but functional beta, so expect some bugs.

Same transparency note as last time: I used AI assistance for a lot of the implementation. I designed the architecture and did the debugging and real-hardware testing, but I'm not going to pretend I manually typed every line.

The bigger news than the game itself: the demo disc is out. Last time I said you could build it from source or wait, and the wait is over. You can play the whole disc in your browser right now, menu music and all, by pressing Run here: https://bonnie-studios.itch.io/psoxide. If you'd rather have the real thing, the bin/cue is a free download to burn: https://bonnie-studios.itch.io/psoxide-demo-disc. Ten programs on one CD-R: NitroXide, VoXide, both Celeste Classics rebuilt native, a working spreadsheet, a Guitar Hero prototype, a hardware test suite, and one more behind a cheat code you already know.

Same clarification as last time, since it appears in the video: Half-Life is on my personal copy of the disc but isn't in the download. That project reads the assets from your own Steam copy and builds the disc locally, so those assets aren't mine to distribute.

The emulator under that browser page deserves its own video, it does a few things I haven't seen other PS1 emulators do, so that's the follow-up.

Links:

NitroXide source: https://github.com/EBonura/nitroxide
PSoXide source: https://github.com/EBonura/PSoXide
Play the demo disc in your browser: https://bonnie-studios.itch.io/psoxide
Download the demo disc: https://bonnie-studios.itch.io/psoxide-demo-disc
X: https://x.com/_bonniestudios
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/izzy88izzy/
Other games and downloads: https://bonnie-studios.itch.io/
Support my projects: https://buymeacoffee.com/bonniestudios

Hope it's a fun watch. Happy to answer anything!

This started as a debugger for my own PS1 games and grew from there, posting it because the debugging side is probably the interesting bit for the community.

Easiest way to try it is in the browser, press "Run" on the itch page and it comes pre-loaded with the PSoXide Demo Disc (you don't need a PS1 BIOS for it), which includes ten of my homebrew programs off one disc: https://bonnie-studios.itch.io/psoxide

Some of the goodies:

• Freecam on L3+R3. Detaches the camera and lets you fly around while the game keeps running underneath you.
• Wireframe toggle.
• RAM visualiser: In CB1 specifically you get a nice live view of the level streaming off the disc into RAM as you walk.
• VRAM visualiser: both framebuffers, and the textures popping in during load screens.
• Frame profiler, so you can see where the console actually spends its time.

Plus the usual: xBR filtering, PS1-native or screen-native resolution, save states, remapping. Crash Bandicoot is the guinea pig for all of it in the video.

Worth saying: I built this to develop and debug my own games, so it's aimed at hardware accuracy rather than running everything. I've done limited testing with commercial titles so expect that some won't boot, the ones that do get all the toys above though. Bring your own legally obtained BIOS and your own dumps and it'll load discs straight from a folder on your drive.

The emulator is one part of PSoXide, an open-source PS1 dev suite: emulator, SDK, engine, editor: https://github.com/EBonura/PSoXide. All developed with substantial AI assistance, with me directing the architecture, the debugging and the hardware verification.

It all exists because I'm making a souls-like for the PS1 and kept hitting tools that didn't exist yet, each one I build ends up improving the stack all my games share.

Hope you enjoy! Feel free to ask any question!

We recently added Tiny Backrooms into our website, a small survival horror project by KasaBranca inspired by the Backrooms and classic PS1 games such as Resident Evil.

The project is made with Mipsync Engine, a new development environment specifically designed to create games for the PS1. It provides a Unity-like workflow with a scene editor, asset management, animation, UI and audio tools, while using its own scripting language, Mips#, which is similar to C#.

Since Mipsync is still very early in development, Tiny Backrooms is also one of the early playable projects made with the engine. The current build is very small, featuring only three prerendered areas, but it already demonstrates the foundations of a PS1-style survival horror game.

We've also included a short gameplay video so you can see the project in action.

We wrote a short article covering the project:

Tiny Backrooms

It's interesting to see new tools making PS1 development more accessible, and I'm curious to see what projects will come out of Mipsync as the engine evolves.