jpolo1224
c91ff32d21
It was a one-time repair for lists poisoned by patches arming themselves, and it
has done more harm than the thing it repaired. It deleted every [Patches]/[Cheats]
Enable entry, not just the self-armed ones, so anyone who had turned a patch on
deliberately lost it silently on update -- and when the patch in question is the
HostFS loader a mod depends on, the mod stops loading, the texture pack keyed to
the modded data stops matching with it, and the whole thing presents as "my
texture mods broke". That cost eleven builds to chase from the wrong end.
Restricting it to lists that look auto-armed was the first attempt at a fix, and
it was still wrong: the threshold is a guess, and someone with thirty cheats
enabled on one game would have been wiped by it just the same. A narrower
silent-data-loss bug is not a fix.
Removing it outright instead, because its job is finished:
- It is a migration, and it has already run for everyone who updated in the past
month. What remains is a shrinking population and a permanent hazard.
- Nothing re-poisons a list now. 10f4f73fe8 removed the unconditional
syncAllEnableLists on Patch Manager open, stopped EnumeratePnachFiles falling
back to the bundled zip over on-disk files, made delete() drop names from the
enable list, and stopped D-pad Right arming the row under the cursor.
- Anyone still carrying a poisoned list can clear it themselves, because
disabling a patch sticks now. That was the original complaint.
Nothing writes these lists except the player, which is how it should have been.
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