Devlog ·

Johnny now runs in your browser — July 14, 2026

~1 min read · 410 words

The shortest path to Johnny just got a lot shorter. As of today the browser player boots the latest release disc directly on the website — no emulator install, no BIOS file, no download-and-unzip step. Click launch, wait for the ~76 MiB image to stream in, and the screensaver starts doing what it has always done best: ignoring you, beautifully.

How it’s wired

The player is the same system we built for our Zoomies PS1 project, ported whole:

  • A pinned EmulatorJS 4.2.3 runtime with a patched PCSX-ReARMed core, vendored into the site. The patch matters: upstream’s interpreter drops PlayStation hardware writes made through KSEG aliases (PSn00bSDK uses those for the SPU), which would leave SPU control and volume registers silently at zero in the browser build. The patch also repairs Level-A XA decoding and routes the core’s audio through a master gain node so the page’s volume and mute controls actually work.
  • An HLE BIOS. Nothing BIOS-shaped ships with the site or lives in the repository — the core’s high-level BIOS emulation boots the disc.
  • Release-time disc delivery. The repository never carries a disc image. At deploy time the Pages workflow downloads the latest GitHub release’s .bin/.cue into the site artifact and writes a small metadata.json describing the build; the player reads that to know what to stream. Ship a new release, and the browser player serves it on the next deploy — nothing to remember.
  • A local prototype loop. ./scripts/run-web.sh in the repo serves the site plus the current development disc over the LAN with a fresh build identifier per rebuild, so a work-in-progress image is playable in a browser tab seconds after make-cd-image.sh finishes.

Controls

The screensaver needs no input — watching is the intended API. When you do want to drive it, the keyboard maps to the pad: Enter opens the pause menu (Start), arrow keys are the D-pad, K is Cross, L is Circle, Backspace is Select, and the Freeplay walk-speed and world-toggle combos are listed on the player page. A connected gamepad is picked up automatically.

The honest caveat

This project’s soul is real-hardware fidelity — address-verified CD streaming, bounded waits, a launch-era console on the bench. A browser WebAssembly core with an HLE BIOS is not that bar, and we’re not claiming it is. The scene ledger bar is still judged on hardware and DuckStation. The browser player is the welcome mat: the fastest possible way to see why this thing is worth a CD-R.