jpolo1224
d2608346c9
The pause menu was silent, and people sit in it for minutes browsing settings, achievements or memory cards mid-game. New PauseMusic object, deliberately separate from LibraryMusic rather than a second gate on it: LibraryMusic refuses to play unless eState == STOPPED, which is the exact opposite condition, and the two have opposite lifetimes. One player serving both would spend its life fighting the other's start conditions. Driven off WindowImpl.overlayVisible || inGameScreen != null rather than from InGameOverlay.open()/close(), for the same reason as the effects around it: many paths reach each state (back, menu button, hotkey, dismissInGameScreen, a boot that force-closes the overlay) and hooking them one by one always misses one. Including inGameScreen matters because openInGameScreen() closes the menu as it opens Settings, and sitting in Settings is the long silence this exists to fill. Start retries for ~3s like the library track: pausing suspends SPU2 but Oboe takes a moment to actually go idle, and start() politely defers while AudioManager still reports audio active, so a single attempt would lose that race every time. Audio focus is deliberately NOT requested — the game's own audio is already suspended, so there is nothing to duck, and grabbing focus for a menu track would stop whatever the player has going in another app. Toggleable and volume-adjustable in App settings like the library music, off by default (audio starting when you open a menu is startling if you didn't ask for it), and a custom track can be imported the same way. onPause/onResume mirror the library track's handling so it never plays behind a backgrounded app; onResume restarts explicitly because the overlay states don't change while backgrounded, so the effect won't re-fire on its own.
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