jpolo1224
7eb414260a
Pressure modifier now applies to buttons that are ALREADY held: the range was only read when a press was emitted, so the gesture these games actually use — hold the button, then ease off — did nothing (MGS2 cancels a shot on a half-pressed Square). Macro turbo holds each state for at least 24ms. The pad is sampled on the VM's own schedule, so the fastest frequencies were emitting presses that fell between two samples and never registered, which read as the turbo being dead. Extra button on the on-screen left stick, for sprint/jump. The stick locks the gesture onto the pointer that started on it, so a separate widget could never be reached by a finger gliding up off the stick; the stick hit-tests the zone itself and keeps emitting deflection, making run-and-sprint one thumb motion. Landscape render position (Center/Top), for foldables and clamshell controllers whose screens open downward. Reuses the vertical-align switch that was gated to portrait. Custom internal resolution as a percentage of native, for steps the presets miss. A value matching no preset also stops displaying as "0.25x" while the GS runs something else. RetroArch overlay artwork: import a pack and draw it between the game frame and the touch controls, so it layers with a shader preset and never covers a button. Second-display panel (Ayn Thor, Retroid dual screen): FPS, battery, clock and buttons for save/load state, fast-forward, pause and screenshot. Battery low and temperature warnings, off the sticky battery broadcast. Delete a save state from the in-game picker by long-pressing its slot. Point the PCSX2 CheatDB source at its current home; the old address is gone.
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