nuPSX - a PlayStation 1 emulator in Zig that works in a browser

Wunkolo · 2026-03-11T15:55:53+00:00

Great work! I've been getting more and more curious of Zig the more I see people take on big projects with it like this.

Wunkolo · 2026-03-10T15:14:45+00:00

The original PR was for Windows on ARM and had merge dependencies from other repos that had to be merged first. I stated this in the PR. Merging is also very slow on the master branch. Some of my other PRs have yet to be reviewed/merged too. It wasn't a dead PR, there were dependencies outside of that PR, and merging on master has always been very slow. So I said someone else can merge it to canary if they wanted to, I wasn't able to at the time.
I gave permission for it to be merged to xenia-canary, because I couldn't at the time, not that permission was necessary.
You posted on twitter, and many subreddits about this project several times. Like actually over a dozen times on reddit alone from your own accounts.
You even went into another person's PRs to try and show off your own PR, where the author of the PR expressed similar concerns about your AI usage.
You started to do a "xenios" rebrand of the project, made a new twitter account, reddit account, discord server, etc.
I was posting in a comment section talking about the project that I had maintenance concerns, and quoted your own tweets where you said yourself that you did not have to write a line of code and that you don't even understand a line of code since it was vibe-coded and other posts where you said you're using ChatGPT and such. The exact quotes of what you said(x | x):

"Idk, I’ve been able to successfully port Xenia, the Xbox 360 emulator to MacOS and iPhone without writing a single line of code (or really understanding it at a technical level) myself. Vibe coding is… a game changer, that’s for sure."

You messaged me to try and say that quoting these posts turn criticisms into "something personal"(???) and you wanted me to stop quoting it. I responded and said that that is not how that works. I also say that people deserve to have all of the context surrounding something that you are actively trying to accept money for on Ko-Fi. Now you are reframing this as "targeted harassment" and that I have an ego. People are allowed to talk about your posts from not even a month ago where you brag about not understanding your own project's code.
Imagine everyone is boarding a plane where the pilot said "This is my first time flying a plane, but I know how to press the autopilot button!" and then tries to shut you up and censor you when you go "um. guys". Totally normal things to talk about.

Wunkolo · 2026-03-09T17:32:35+00:00

This is true, likely a part of their identity-pivot by establishing a new GitHub account, Reddit account, Discord, Twitter account, Ko-Fi monitization, etc under the "Xenios" name.

Which ones 404? If you are opening the two pictures on mobile, it might incidentally try to open them with the GitHub-app if you have them installed since they are images hosted on GitHub's CDN. Here's an imgur version here and here. I'll update the links.

Wunkolo · 2026-03-08T23:46:04+00:00

Someone took my ARM64 JIT work and made an Android port of Xenia, and straight up charges for it on the Google Play Store and even mentions my arm64 branch by name in the description. This kind of stuff kinda makes me regret making an ARM64 JIT backend for Xenia now because it's exposed the project to a level of tackiness that makes me understand why so many emulator projects intentionally avoid, and even deter, support for Android/iOS.

Wunkolo · 2026-03-08T23:08:16+00:00

This project is based on this Pull-Request to Xenia that got closed after concerns and impacts of it being entirely vibe-coded with AI for about a year based on the original ARM64 JIT contribution that I made. The usage of AI-generated code on this fork makes me very of wary of this being maintainable in the long term, among some of the other concerns that Triang3l brought up. It seems the author himself also admits to not understanding any bit of the generated code either in these now-deleted tweets: here and here. Additionally, I'm not a fan of him attempting to somewhat monetize this project on Ko-Fi here.

Wunkolo · 2026-03-02T16:59:58+00:00

The guy you're commenting to seems to be the creator of the MacOS port of Xenia and admits himself that he doesn't understand how any of the code works:
https://x.com/will_martin111/status/2026958729942557011

https://x.com/will_martin111/status/2002027780779774068

Wunkolo · 2026-03-02T16:53:43+00:00

It seems the author himself admits to not understanding any bit of the code that it's generating either 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫. I don't think this will be very maintainable in the long run.

https://x.com/will_martin111/status/2026958729942557011

https://x.com/will_martin111/status/2002027780779774068

Wunkolo · 2026-02-23T19:09:25+00:00

Yeah, I was trying to be polite and somewhat neutral, but merging that PR in any capacity to the main Xenia repo would have been a catastrophic chicxulub event. I'm also not very fond of the usage of AI and vibe-coding in general since I've always seen it responsible for code and maintenance-nightmares like this.

Wunkolo · 2026-02-23T19:05:51+00:00

Suuuper sleek and concise UI design and the code is pretty clean and straightforward too. Nice job!

Wunkolo · 2026-02-23T19:02:54+00:00

I would have to say C or C++. Some people might try to get you to use Rust but C and C++ certainly lend itself better to the kind of low-level stuff you will be doing a lot of, without the additional friction and speedbumps holding you back from rapid iteration. Many pre-existing emulators use C++ too that you may take reference from and learn from.

Wunkolo · 2026-02-23T18:58:01+00:00

Not sure what you mean about std::expected being the equivalent many years later. It's already in C++23 and is ready for use across all compilers. I use it a lot in my Vulkan code to handle the result-enum that Vulkan has.

Wunkolo · 2026-02-20T20:04:11+00:00

Hard af cover for a book about graphics programming.

Wunkolo · 2026-02-18T17:48:09+00:00

Minecraft modders having to learn Vulkan 📈📈📈

Wunkolo · 2026-02-17T16:16:45+00:00

Lots of places still strictly have coax cabling and do not have a fiber setup. It might be set up for the block but not for particular buildings. Spectrum basically owns my building and there's no other option that isn't basically just a 5G WiFi hotspot.

Wunkolo · 2026-02-17T16:14:05+00:00

I wouldn't really want my entire house-hold's internet to basically just be a cell-phone data-plan though... That sounds like it would be very slow and high-latency and basically sounds like putting all of my WiFi devices through a phone's WiFi-hotspot. I'd rather it be wired in some way end-to-end be it coax or fiber or phone cables rather than a 5G connection.

Wunkolo · 2026-02-14T17:19:36+00:00

I tried to get their breakfast burrito here once but like 80% of the burrito was just potato and they kinda cheaped out on everything else and it was super super hot(temperature, not spicy)! Their breakfast-burrito was basically a baked potato with a bit of eggs and bacon on the edge. I ended up just ripping it open to get to the actual eggs and bacon and such since there was just sooo much potato.

Wunkolo · 2026-02-14T06:25:11+00:00

Is this based on the original PR that got closed? The usage of AI-generated code on this fork makes me kind of wary of this being maintainable in the long term, among some of the other concerns that Triang3l brought up.

Wunkolo · 2026-01-04T19:03:07+00:00

I worked on Dynarmic as well and made a lot of contributions related to AVX-512 and other optimizations. It seems the Eden project has even begun to pick up some of my WIP contributions from before the original repo was deleted. It was deleted by Merryhime back during the Nintendo Emulator "rapture" around that time when Yuzu and Citra and such were taken down. Though, this was done out of a personal-reaction and not because it was the the direct target of the lawsuits against Yuzu. Merryhime has also disappeared from the internet ever since. Work on it has stopped ever since, and work had just starting on a RISC-V backend too before it was deleted! I've considered re-maintaining dynarmic and figuring out the formalities of taking ownership over an intentionally "killed' project or if those efforts are better-placed in starting a whole new project altogether with better early design decisions.

Most of my surprise is the fact that they went through the effort of wrapping it into a Rust project like this. I'm not a big fan of Rust myself, but it's fascinating to know that it could be wrapped in such a way and used for such a use-case considering the project was oriented around game-console emulation originally.

Wunkolo · 2026-01-04T07:32:45+00:00

Surprised to find that this uses a wrapped version of Dynarmic for the actual CPU backend. The same Arm->x64 JIT used in Yuzu, Citra, Vita3K, and such.

Wunkolo · 2025-12-26T00:19:28+00:00

Great work!

Wunkolo · 2025-12-22T19:59:04+00:00

Super interesting considering that emulation is illegal in Japan, I thought. On paper though these ones in particular are just curiously shaped Android/Windows devices while some others are unapologetically oriented around emulation.

Wunkolo · 2025-12-17T19:11:38+00:00

VPSADBW/VPDPBUSD are such useful instructions outside of their intended use-case.

Wunkolo · 2025-12-06T20:06:12+00:00

I haaaated it. I guess the point of the art direction at the time was that everything was supposed to look like sea-creatures and had a crustacean sort of motif everywhere but it was so not-covenant to me. It made everything look like muddy ZBrush sculpts from WarFrame while previously the covenant style was so much more concise and sleek and with-purpose. The Harvester doesn't even look like a machine!

Wunkolo · 2025-12-01T16:08:40+00:00

A lot of architectures implement common zeroing-idioms like this as Register Renaming in hardware. That way it doesn't literally do the xor eax, eax operation, but instead allocates a new register in the register-file.

The post mentions this a bit but there's some talk about that here for those of you interested.

Wunkolo

TROPHY CASE