Bonnie Studios

Hi, I'm Manny. Software engineer, guitarist and game developer from Sicily, living in London.

I started with PICO-8. Its limits felt weirdly cozy: tiny screen, small carts, hard caps on everything. That's where I learned how much you can get out of a box that says no.

After PICO-8 I wanted real hardware. I tried Godot, Picotron, TrenchBroom and Blender along the way, all fine tools, but a modern engine lets you switch the constraints off, and I didn't want that option. I wanted to make games as if they had to ship on the original PlayStation, and then actually run them on one. Nothing fit that brief, so I built the tools.

PSoXide

Everything below runs on PSoXide, a Rust stack for making PS1 games: a bare-metal SDK, a shared engine, a BSP level and UI editor, asset cookers, disc mastering, and an emulator with a debugger and profiler. The idea is to solve each PlayStation problem once and hand the answer to every game. It's pre-1.0, moving fast, and open source. The web build runs the whole demo disc in your browser, no BIOS needed.

What's on the disc

The PSoXide PS1 Demo Disc is one BIN/CUE that boots on a real console into a menu and chain-loads everything:

Quake Shareware PS1 port: the whole first episode, monsters, weapons, water and sky, on the PS1.
Cortex Ignition: a souls-like tech demo in a dark cybernetic world, built from scratch for the console.
NitroXide: rocket-car football. Boost first, brake eventually. Two-player split-screen and a CD audio soundtrack.
VoXide: a Minecraft-style survival sandbox with streamed chunks, caves, crafting, farming and two extra dimensions.
Celeste Classic PS1 Collection: both PICO-8 Celeste games rebuilt in Rust, 60 fps, music synthesized live on the PS1's SPU.
PSXcel: a spreadsheet for the PlayStation. Formulas, charts, an on-screen keyboard. Yes, it actually calculates.

Also in the works: the Half-Life PS1 port, a source-only fan port of the full campaign that you build from your own copy of the game.

Before the PlayStation

Horizon Glide (2025) grew out of a PICO-8 procedural-landscapes experiment into an infinite isometric shooter with a banging soundtrack. Cortex Override (2024) is the PICO-8 cyberpunk action game that started all this, somewhere between Zelda and Armored Core. Both play in the browser.