J1coding
29190ff8eb
The Games library already rendered a user-chosen background behind its
list; the other menu tabs did not, and the background helpers that drew it
lived privately inside GameListView. This promotes those helpers to shared
code and lets the remaining menu tabs opt in.
- New MenuBackgroundSupport.swift holds MenuBackgroundLayer (the edge-to-
edge wallpaper view) and the menuBackgroundListRow modifier (the rounded
material row backing used so list rows stay readable over a wallpaper).
GameListView now uses these instead of its private copies.
- BIOSListView, HelpView, and SettingsRootView draw the background inside
their own NavigationStack when their per-tab toggle is on, matching how
GameListView already worked. RootView (MenuTabView) no longer wraps those
tabs in a background ZStack; a tab that owns its wallpaper must not also
be wrapped in SafeAreaProtectedMenuTabContent, or the safe-area padding
would clip the wallpaper.
- Three per-tab toggles (backgroundEnabledInBIOS/Help/Settings, persisted
in UserDefaults) are surfaced in Appearance settings under "Show
Background In". Games keeps the background unconditionally; the others
default off so existing users see no change until they opt in.
SafeAreaProtectedMenuTabContent is also tightened for iOS 26+: SwiftUI now
reports the correct landscape safe-area inset for a TabView page, so the
manual notch-clearing pad is only applied when SwiftUI itself reports no
horizontal inset. Applying it unconditionally doubled the inset on iOS 26+
and made the menu tabs feel cramped in landscape.
ARMSX2 — Native ARM64 JIT Fork of PCSX2
ARMSX2 is a free and open-source PlayStation 2 (PS2) emulator based on PCSX2. Its purpose is to emulate the PS2's hardware, using a combination of MIPS CPU Interpreters, Recompilers and a Virtual Machine which manages hardware states and PS2 system memory. This allows you to play PS2 games on your phone, PC, or gaming handheld, with many additional features and benefits.
Thank You
The ARMSX2 team is eternally indebted to the PCSX2 project it is based on. We are so fortunate to build on their 20 years of hardcore development.
About This Fork
The upstream PCSX2 project ships an ARM64 interpreter build for ARM, but its high-performance JIT recompilers (EE, IOP, VU0, VU1, and vtlb fast memory) are x86-64 only.
This fork exists to close that gap. The goal is to preserve the correctness features of 20 years of PCSX2 development, while generating the fastest native ARM performance possible.
Current status:
- ✅ EE (Emotion Engine) recompiler — integer, float, MMI, COP0/COP1/COP2, branches, load/store
- ✅ IOP (I/O Processor / R3000A) recompiler — full integer, load/store, branches, coprocessors
- ✅ VU (Vector Unit) recompiler — microVU skeleton + Upper FMAC vector ISA complete; Lower ISA and runtime complete
- ✅ vtlb fast memory
- ✅ Native ARM64 binary builds and boots the PS2 BIOS
- ✅ 2D games are already playable
- ✅ 3D games run
Why LLMs / AI Were Used
A word on methodology:
The x86-64 JIT code in upstream ARMSX2 is already proven correct — it has run thousands of PS2 titles for years. The challenge in this port is not emulator design or JIT theory; it is mechanical translation of a large, well-understood x86-64 assembly codebase into equivalent ARM64 assembly (via VIXL) while preserving the exact same register-allocation contracts, block lifecycle, and recompiler semantics.
Large language models (LLMs) were used as an accelerant for this translation work — pattern-matching x86 JIT boilerplate to ARM64 equivalents, scaffolding emit routines, and keeping the porting velocity high. The JIT logic (block compiler, dispatcher, analysis passes, flag pipelines, clamping rules, Tri-Ace hacks, etc.) is taken directly from the upstream x86 implementation and validated against it. Nothing was hallucinated from scratch.
In other words: the hard engineering was done by the PCSX2 team over two decades. The hard typing — translating ~50k lines of x86 emitter code into ARM64 — is what AI helped compress.
System Requirements
ARMSX2 targets ARM64 across desktop (macOS, Windows, Linux) and mobile (Android, iOS/iPadOS), all from the single shared core. Our setup documentation page contains additional details on software and hardware requirements.
Please note that a BIOS dump from a legitimately-owned PS2 console is required to use the emulator. For more information, visit this page.
Building
Check out our github actions for the latest build recipe