NES, SNES, Genesis, VirtualBoy, and PSX | A journey with AI and Recompilation
1379.tech · 1379.tech · 2026-05-21
Five consoles, five recompilers, four months: the recap that carries the whole story from 8-bit Mario to the PlayStation BIOS.
This is the essay to read first if you want the whole arc in one place. It recaps how five static recompilers, covering the NES, SNES, Genesis, Virtual Boy, and PlayStation, came together in four months, each with at least one commercial game running natively.
The scoreboard at time of writing: NESRecomp had reached 10 supported commercial titles, and PSXRecomp was booting the full PlayStation system BIOS, complete with working memory-card management, rather than shortcutting past it with high-level emulation. Those two data points bracket the range of the approach, from an 8-bit console with well-studied disassemblies to a 32-bit machine whose kernel itself gets recompiled.
The essay is also candid about method: Claude Code became the primary development tool after October 2025, and the post walks through what a human-plus-agent workflow looks like when the output has to be verified against real hardware behavior rather than taken on faith.
Related: NES, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Virtual Boy, and PlayStation.