Pocket VoxelA Game Boy RPG, carved into a voxel diorama.

One cooked pak, one guest bundle — running on a real PSP, a real PS Vita, and your desktop. Deterministic to the byte.

Hardware first

Every screenshot on this page is a capture from a real PSP-2000 over PSPLINK. The same build installs on a stock HENkaku Vita as a single VPK — no extra runtime, no shader compiler.

Run it on a PSP

🧊

One pak, many machines

Fidelity is a runtime ladder, not a build flag. The same pak serves the PSP rung, the Vita rung and the desktop identity rung — the host names its rung, the guest never knows.

The quality ladder

🔁

Inverted ownership

Game state lives in the TypeScript guest — world, battle, script VM, saves, RNG. The Rust core owns only the retained scene. Steady-state boundary traffic is ~10–40 ops per tick.

The split

🎲

Deterministic to the byte

Two cooks are byte-identical. Intent tapes drive every host; committed goldens are frame hashes, and re-basing one is a ceremony that pays with a pixel-diff proof.

Testing & determinism

🎵

Sample-exact chip audio

The ROM's own sound programs, interpreted core-side and rendered to PCM. All 45 songs, 104 effects and 154 cries verified sample-exact against the reference — ~200 million samples, zero differences.

How audio works

🔐

ROM-fed, never committed

The only game-content input is a ROM you already own, SHA-1 verified before one byte is decoded. Everything derived lands under git-ignored dist/ — no cooked pak, no extracted art, no pixels.

The content boundary

Pallet Town as a voxel diorama on a real PSP — carved trees, gabled roofs, an NPC and the player between the houses. — Pallet Town on a PSP-2000 — carved tree hulls, template-matched buildings, baked ambient occlusion.

226 tests15 golden marks × 2 rungs303/303 audio programs sample-exact~37k triangles under a 33.3 ms present lock480×272 logical · 960×544 on Vita

The same build, everywhere the ladder reaches

The player's bedroom: bookshelves, bed, SNES and a potted plant, voxelized. — The player's bedroom — pinned props from the mod's template tables.

Route 1: tall encounter grass, ledges, fences, and rows of carved trees. — Route 1 — encounter grass, ledges, and the three-ring tree gradient.

One pipeline, three machines

Cook time Bun · your machine

importROM → gen/ — SHA-1 gated, manifest-driven

↓

cookclassify tiles · carve trees · match 42 building templates · bake AO & colour · pack chunks

↓

voxelmon.vxpakone cooked pak — every machine, every rung

➜

Run time on the device

QuickJS guestthe gameplay port — one frame(buttons) per tick

↓~10–40 ops / tick

pocketvoxel-coreculling · camera rungs · retained scene · chip synth

↓one ordered draw list

pocketvoxel-guPSP · sceGu

pocketvoxel-gxmVita · raw GXM

pocketvoxel-simdesktop raster

The acceptance path: intent tapes drive the same run on every host, pinned by 15 golden marks × 2 quality rungs — committed as frame hashes, never pixels.

The gameplay is a TypeScript port of the gen1recomp Lua engine running in an embedded QuickJS guest; the presentation is a Rust reimplementation of the DramaticShape Voxel Mod diorama renderer. Both upstreams are MIT-licensed, and both serve as executable specifications, not vendored code — every ported formula cites the Lua it ports, and the reference implementations run under LuaJIT as oracles in the test suite.

Pocket Voxel is a specialized runtime of PocketJS: the same ⟨ core, surface, guest ⟩ composition as OpenStrike, with the ownership split inverted. Start with the architecture overview, or go straight to getting the pipeline running.