Emulating Playstation

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!

[tags]playstation, psx, ps1, emulation, emulator, epsxe, peops, bios, SCPH1001.bin[/tags]