Terminally Incoherent

Someone asked me today about Playstation emulators. I actually still own a PS1 - there is probably like a 3 inch layer of dust on the laser lens, but I still have it somewhere in the house. So I never really looked into emulation.

It’s not like it’s black magic though. A little bit of googling goes a long way these days. It took me about 10 seconds to locate a relatively popular PS1 emulator and bunch of assorted howto links and send that off to the person who asked. Since I had all of that research done I decided to do the leg work set up the emulator myself. This way if the setup hits a snag, I can shoot them another email warning them of the potential problems. Fortunately, the whole thing is actually a relatively easy process.

Here is what you do:

1. Go to ePSXe website and download the emulator
2. Unzip it wherever you want - it doesn’t matter - it creates a nice little file structure - you are mainly interested in the bios and plugins folder
3. Go into the bios folder and delete stupid shit that is there
4. Do the same for plugins folder
5. Find a PS1 BIOS file and drop it in the bios folder. How do you get one? ePSXe will actually tell you that you need file called SCPH1001.bin. This file is copyrighted by Sony so I’m not going to link to a download but I can tell you these files are out there. Here is a tip: fucking google it! If you search for the file name you will find an illegal download within 5 minutes - I promises. Oh, and I didn’t tell you that.
6. Go get the open source PEOpS plugins from sourceforge. There is a GPU plugin, sound plugin and a cd-rom plugin. Get all 3, unzip and drop the dlls in the plugin folder.
7. Run ePSXe.exe and go through the configuration wizard. You may need to specify which optical drive you want to use, and etc. I used the PEOpS plugins for GPU and CD, but set the sound to be done via the built in engine because when I used PEOpS the audio was choppy and delayed. Either way, it all depends on your hardware so play around with the options a bit. Start by setting every ting to reccomended and then tweak if things look wrong.

Thats’ it - thats’ how easy it is. It took me maybe 20 minutes, including the time I spent hunting for the BIOS file and plugins, configuring them, finding the stash of my PS1 games and tweaking the sound setting several times to fix the audio.

I plopped my old Metal Gear Solid CD into the drive and gave it a test run just to show you that it worked:

click to enlarge

This is how ePSXe looks in windowed mode. By default it runs in full screen mode, but I changed it to take the screenshot. Btw, playing MGS with keyboard is weird as hell.

Sigh… This is what I’m doing instead of writing my thesis. What the hell are you doing to me people!

My first computer was Amiga 600. It came with the ultra speedy 7.09 MHz CPU and a whooping 1 MB of RAM. It may sound small to you now, but at the time these were really good specs.

A600 was a complete disaster for Commodore - it had essentially the same hardware as its predecessor, Amiga 500, but was nearly impossible to extend or upgrade, and it lacked the numpad, Why did we buy it back then? Because it was marketed top of the line at the time and we just didn’t know any better. I was to young and to inexperienced to figure out that if we held off with the purchase for a few months, and saved up a little more we could have bought the more awesome Amiga 1200. But the good old 600 served me well for many years.

I do have nostalgic periods when I get into retro-gaming, and relive childhood. I was able to play most of the old games using ScummVM and DOSBox. Most of the good games from that period existed both on Amiga and PC platforms. Some didn’t though. So recently I decided to set up an Amiga emulator. Here is what you’ll need to do:

1. Download and install WinUAE Emulator
2. Buy an official Kickstart ROM
3. Grab some game ROM’s from ROM World

Wait! Don’t go yet! If you don’t want to buy, there are other, less legal ways to get a kickstart. Do I need to remind you that Google is your friend? Anyways, apparently a piece of software is not abandonware as long as someone willing to legally sell it. Meh…

The emulator is very intuitive, but the ROM auto-detection did not work for me. I had to manually map the rom, but that’s an easy task. It will take you a total of 3 clicks (not counting navigating to the ROM file in the file dialog). On subsequent starts the app just grabbed the appropriate one without any prompting so you really only need to do this once. Leaving all the other options on default settings will usually work just fine for most of the games.

The only other thing that you should probably know when playing games is that by default the Joy is mapped to numpad keys, with 0 and 5 being detected as the fire button.

This might save you sitting 10 minutes on the title screen of Shadow of the Beast. Yes, I just sat there waiting and listening the the title music like a retard. It’s a great game though - and frustratingly difficult at that. It brings back memories. Me and my brother used to be completely addicted to it back in the day.

Btw, I’m amazed how few people here in NJ even know about Comodore Amiga computers. Amiga’s market share in Poland was huge when I was growing up. In fact, at one point it essentiallt owned the home computer market because it was simply the superior choice for gamers. Amigas could be easily connected to your TV so you didn’t need to buy a dedicated monitor. 90% of the time you would just boot your software (game) from a floppy so the user experience was comperable to owning a console. It also had a nice graphical OS that was easy to use and intuitive when you needed it. For comparison, most PC’s were running DOS + Norton Commander combination (or if you were lucky a cunky early windows version).

When I mention Amiga here, even among more knowledgabe individuals, they usually give me blank stares or ask if it was like a Nintendo. I guess they never made a big dent in the American market.

After watching that Ryden vs. Ken animation I desperately wanted to play a Street Fighter game today. Unfortunately, after digging through all my PS1 games I realized that I never owned one. Sure, I rented few titles back in a day, but I never actually purchased one.

So I went and downloaded Mame. What is Mame you ask? It’s the ultimate arcade emulator. It’s a little command line app which will turn your PC into an arcade machine. All you need to do is to unzip the client somewhere, put a game rom in the roms directory and you are ready to go.

You can download roms from Rom World. Just select MAME as your platform and start downloading. For example, let’s assume you downloaded X-Men vs Street fighter (which will be xmvsf.zip). Let’s assume you have mame in C:\mame\. Unzip the xmvsf into the C:\mame\roms directory so that now you have C:\mame\roms\mxvsf.

Now just run mame with the name of the folder and it should run the game. Here is an example session:


Szaman2 @ GRENDEL : C:$>cd mame

Sorry - don’t mind my prompt. I just can’t stand the usual C:> bullshit :p

Anyways, the emulator runs in full screen mode but hitting ESC will kill it and kick you back to windows. The default key mappings are as such:

5 - insert coin
1 - player 1 start
2 - player 2 start
F2 - diagnostic menu
TAB - emulator options (here you can re-map the keys)
left CTRL - game button 1
left ALT - game button 2
SPACE - game button 3
arrows - up, down, right, etc…

The default button mappings are beyond retarded. Even in a 2 button game using CTRL and ALT is dangerous as you are hovering over the windows key. Every time you hit it, windows will send the emulator to background. This wont crash the game, but it is annoying as hell if you do this every 10 seconds it gets old fast.

Most fighting games from capcom use 6 buttons which makes the default setup unusable. I mapped the buttons to numpad keys but that’s far from perfect solution… Good news is that you can manage the key mappings on a per game basis

I spent the evening today getting my ass kicked on all the fighting games I downloaded. Fighting games were not meant to be played on keyboard… But it’s great to re-live these games once again. If you fondly remember all the classic arcade games, give Mame a try!