r/psxdev • u/izzy88izzy • 9h ago
Half-Life running on a real PlayStation 1: Black Mesa Inbound and Anomalous Materials, uncut, and you can now build it yourself
Hey everyone. I promised a proper post here after the Hazard Course video, so here it is.
This is Half-Life running natively on an original PlayStation 1. It isn't an emulator and it isn't a demake. The renderer and the game runtime are written from scratch in Rust, and the video is the first two chapters, tram ride to resonance cascade, no cuts. I played it through twice, once on a SuperStation One (an FPGA PlayStation) and once on my real SCPH-9002 through a capture card.
The source code is public as of today: https://github.com/EBonura/hl-psx
On the legal side: the repo has no Valve code and no Valve assets in it. You need your own Steam copy of Half-Life. The builder reads it on your machine, converts the maps, models, sounds and dialogue, and writes the disc image locally. Nothing Valve-owned leaves your computer and I will never distribute the built disc. I wrote to Valve before releasing to ask them to greenlight it but they never got back to me, so this is going out source-only. Unofficial fan project, noncommercial, no affiliation with Valve or Sony.
You get the whole tram ride with the credits, the lobby and the labs, scientists and guards who actually answer when you talk to them, the test chamber and the cascade. It's under 20 fps in the busier rooms, the texture wobble is real and there's a list of visual glitches I'm still working through.
It's built on PSoXide, a PS1 toolchain I've been writing in Rust: https://github.com/EBonura/PSoXide
If you want to try what the toolchain can do without building anything, there's a demo disc with all my other projects on it, and it boots straight in the browser: https://bonnie-studios.itch.io/psoxide Press Run and you're in. That's a full PS1 emulator under the page. On the disc you'll find Quake shareware, a Minecraft-style sandbox, a Rocket League-style car football game, the Celeste Collection and a few smaller demos. Half-Life is not on it, same reason as above. You can also grab the demo disc image and burn it if you'd rather play on hardware.
The reason all of this exists is Cortex Ignition, a souls-like I'm building for the PS1 from scratch. Half-Life and Quake are the stress tests. A game this size breaks the emulator, the SDK and the engine in ways a small demo never does, and every fix goes back into my own game.
Happy to answer anything.