PS1

Manny has been wanting this software to exist for 20 years. Security engineer by day, indie developer by night, he grew up with a PlayStation and never stopped thinking about making games for it. When he finally got around to trying, the barrier wasn’t the complexity of the hardware: it was that the tools available were in C++ and getting them started was too difficult. Their solution was the most radical possible: build the tools from scratch. Have your own emulator. The result is called PSoXide. According to describes Manny himselfis a complete development stack for PS1 written entirely in Rust: emulator, SDK, engine, level editor and pipeline disk. And Claude is built into the emulator as part of the architecture. “This would have been completely impossible without the LLMs,” says Manny, and it is not an exaggeration: PSoXide is a highly complex project, which would have required a team behind it, but which he has been able to emulate on his own thanks to AI. How it works. The emulator implements the complete machine: the R3000A CPU, the GPU, the GTE, the CD-ROM, the DMA, the SPU, the timers and the MDEC. As detailed in the Project READMEManny built a suite of tests with more than 65 ROMs, and then made a test CD to run it on a real PS1 and be able to check if the emulator was imitating the original machine one hundred percent. The SDK, in short, is very complete: it communicates directly with the hardware instead of going through the console’s BIOS for performance reasons. And it has dedicated modules for GPU, GTE, controllers, SPU audio with ADPCM, CD-ROM and ISO9660. And memory cards, of course. Without Claude it can’t be done. Manny says the part he’s most excited about about the editor is that it “wires the emulator directly to Claude”: there’s an MCP server that exposes about 25 endpoints of debugso the model can inspect the state of the CPU, VRAM, and registers as they work. “Debugging a PS1 game by simply asking Claude to inspect the hardware is like a wet dream,” he says. When something goes wrong in a game’s behavior, Manny can ask Claude to directly read the logs from the emulated hardware and diagnose what’s going on. That design is a direct consequence of how the project uses AI: PSoXide was developed “with substantial assistance from AI, with a human leading the architecture, the debugging and hardware verification.” That is, and this is also important and makes clear certain preconceptions about how AI can replace programmers: he directs, AI executes. Being “a software engineer in the pre-AI era means that in the long term I can guide the models in a way that the code remains stable and expandable.” Manny: Origins. According to your profile on itch.ioManny started programming with the PICO-8, whose limitations (small resolution, small cartridges) taught him what restriction can do for creativity. Then he built BONNIE-32its own console in Rust, with software renderer and integrated tools. In parallel, in February 2026, it published an experimental alpha version of a port of ‘Zelda: Ocarina of Time’…for PS1. He made it playable, with 3D movement and a camera controllable with the sticks, and conceived it as a learning tool for real hardware. The catalogue. The first game published on PSoXide is the ‘Celeste Classic Collection PSX‘: Maddy Thorson and Noel Berry’s two PICO-8 games ‘Celeste Classic’ and ‘Celeste 2: Lani’s Trek’, rewritten in Rust on the PSoXide SDK. Be careful, we are not looking at a PICO-8 emulator running on the PS1, but rather native code: an executable of approximately 468 KB, graphics with 4 bits per pixel textures, real-time synthesized audio with 8 voices… This beauty runs at 60 frames per second and is downloaded on itch.io at a free price. And after that, a much more ambitious project: Manny is working with a 3D artist on an original game for PS1, a souls-like with three-dimensional graphics for the console. Or as Manny says, “aimed at something you really care about, AI doesn’t replace your creativity, it unlocks it.” In Xataka | Claude Code is being the big favorite among programmers. So much so that he already signs 4% of everything that is uploaded to GitHub