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This sort of problem (mine just finally died) is why I now use an emulator. By no means perfect, its certainly cheap.

You haven't lived until you've tried getting Final Fantasy VII for PC running on a modern machine.

Actually, nowadays it works fine, since the machines are fast enough to run it smoothly without 3D acceleration. With 3D acceleration enabled, the biggest challenge was reaching the next savepoint before the game crashed.

Of course, you could just run the PSX version on a Playstation emulator - ePSXe works wonderfully nowadays, even under Linux. Kinda funny: I've never owned a Playstation, but have bought games for it nonetheless :). And I'm writing this while listening to Skull Man's theme from mega Man 4 (NES). Ah, the times when I was young and NES was something new and wonderfull...

I always thought the PlayStation Emulator "ePSXe" was a nice bit of software weighing in at 180 kilobytes for the linux binary.

http://www.epsxe.com/news.php

You will need:
1. a copy of the bios
2. all of the plugins http://www.pbernert.com/
3. patience to set up the plugins to work with your hardware

You're Welcome (maybe)

http://www.epsxe.com/news.php

why mess around with mechanical emulators if you can just run the games on your pc and output the picture on the telly through your tv-out cable ?

yeah sure playing screens on a display that requires a magnifying glass is cool, but running epsxe in foreground and building gentoo on the back is way more sexy :)

Knowing Sony's history of buying PSX emulators like "Bleem!" and "Virtual Gamestation", it will be an emulator that uses ISO files. One simply downloads the ISO files to the PSP or stores them on a memory chip.

I am amazed that other PSX emulators like ePSXe haven't been ported to the PSP already.

But does it plug into your regular TV and play play station or xbox games?

Well, yes, it has a TV out, and yes, it can play playstation games.

More than a console? Certainly, but the games are often cheaper and there are more of them. Plus you don't have to play for Xbox Live or the like.

Personally, I'm pleased with both my Xbox and a similar Windows PC which I keep around to do some work stuff on and occasionally use for games. But if you can only get one, there really are vastly more games you can play with a PC than a console (of any kinda).

I use my home built playstation all the time http://www.epsxe.com/

ePSXe - the actual emulator - http://www.epsxe.com/
scph1001.bin - the ROM image - use Google
A video plugin - the ePSXe site lists the ones you should use, but on a modern GPU, Pete's OpenGL will work nicely. If you've got an OLD GPU, the PeOPS Soft GPU will work.

The ePSXe tutorial will tell you how to tie it all together...

The previous generation of consoles were the N64 and PSX, neither of which are emulated on the PSP yet (the PSX isn't even well-emulated on the PC yet).

PSX is well emulated. For example, ePSXe has played everything I've bothered throwing at it on my 1GHz Duron 512MB GeForce2MX 64MB machine (but development seems to have halted), but I've yet to find a good N64 emulator - Mupen64, for example, constantly cuts sound and slows down in large areas, not to mention hangs randomly (in Z:OoT).

I cant play Xenogears, Xenosaga, most Final Fantasies and a whole host of other games on my PC's.

Sure you can. (Well maybe not Xenosaga... yet)

As opposed to... what?

I can still play the old arcade games in Windows too, in an emulator. MAME, for example, works just as well in Windows as it does in Linux.

Others actually work better in Windows. E.g., I tried ePSXe in Linux. (For those who don't know, ePSXe is currently _the_ best Playstation emulator.) Seein' as, you know, it does have a Linux port and Linux plugins and all.

Except in Linux I was getting a whole 3 frames per second. Whereas in Windows it could do 200+ FPS even with FSAA and anisotropic filtering (for when I want to quickly skip over a lengthy animation) or be throttled reliably to the PSX-correct 60 FPS (when not.)

I'm suspecting that ATI's drivers are to blame there. Looked to me like I was still getting the OpenGL support from MESA instead of them.

But that's exactly the kind of hassle that Linux gaming means. Oops, you have to fiddle with the drivers and settings some more.

My all-time favorite RPG series has got to be Grandia. It's MUCH better-written than Final Fantasy (and just about any other RPG I could name except maybe Earthbound), I like the music more, the characters are works of art, and the battle system is actually fun instead of a mere punishment factor against leveling up.

Yet, my Playstation hasn't worked for years, and I went with Gamecube in the current generation, so no PS2 backwards compatibility for me. So I haven't actually been able to play the original Grandia in all that time.

This is why I was so pleased to find out about ePSXe, a Playstation emulator that can play actual PSX disks inserted in a computer's hard drive. As time passes and the motors inside of optical drives break down, ultimately this will be the only way to play these old games.

(Preemptive caveat: I know what the Sony guys have said, that the original PS format will live forever. My response is that no, it won't, there's no way in hell Sony will continue to allow themselves to be beholden to the original PS format forever, as the profit available for supporting then declines further and further they can and will abandon the old PS1 format someday, it's just a question of when.)

Sony, of course, sued Bleem!, the commercial Playstation emulator, to smithereens. Yet ultimately I think this worked against them, because the net (and debatable) sales loss from piracy was probably less than the potential sales gain from letting people play Playstation games on their computer for $50 bucks, the price of the emulator, instead of $150 bucks, the then-price of the PSX.

Interesting to note that now, five years later, I'm playing through Grandia on a free emulator instead.

You can't play Crash Bandicoot on Windows XP, so it will not be a good platform.

Oh really? This PlayStation emulator runs on both Windows and Linux. Sure, it's not compatible with 100 percent of PS1 titles, but Windows XP SP2 isn't compatible with 100 percent of Windows 98 games either.

Would that make emulators illegal then?

Emulators will never be illegal, maybe the ROMs/ISOs but, not the emulators. It's only illegal to download/obtain a copy of a game you don't own or never owned.

...While there isn't any emulator out there today that can really do decent psx emulation...

PS1 emulation is right about where N64 emulation is, we have decent, playable emulation for both platforms right now, and it's always improving.ePSXe emulates the PSX almost perfectly for most games, with a decent video plugin. I recently finished FF7 on the emulator (I have the discs but no PS/PS2), and with my GCN to USB adapter it was was a nearly spot on reproduction of my experience playing it on the PS1.

PS1? ePSXe.

I submitted a similar question several months ago. You might want to check it out. It was more geared towards the PS2 and consoles, but there were a lot of good suggestions all over the board.

On that note, by the way, consider a console. I never saw the point in them, as I've been playing computer games for twenty years. But then I got married, and (as you're discovering) the computer games are not nearly as social as the consoles. Consoles are geared towards multiple players, whereas there are very, very few games out there that utilize multiple players on a computer.

On a highlight, there's always something like ePSXe and other console emulators. Get one set up and go rent some PS1 games! They're cheap to buy, now too, and almost any modern computer emulates the PS1 with cycles to spare. Get a couple of joysticks, (or buy PS1 pads and the converters -- they're out there but I have not tried them).

There are also plenty of good old arcade games, so as another poster mentioned, MAME is a great idea. You can, of course, find ROMS online if you are so inclined. Golden Axe, Gauntlet, Double Dragon, Xenophobe. These may not be the best examples, but they're out there.

So in short, I'm clueless for computer games per se. But for PS2/Xbox, my favorite is Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. It's simultaneous two player, cooperative, not split screen, contains plenty of shopping for new items (my wife loves that part -- seriously), and although it's not phenomenally long, it has pretty good replayability. The sequel comes out in the next couple months, too.

There are several playstation one emulators for linux that work quite well. ePSXe is a good one.

Not to mention the standard SNES, and NES emulators that are rock solid.

Scott

Things do not need to be open to be good. I think closed, fixed consoles make for better games in the long run

... doesn't exist yet. Still looking for a good 256MB / 512MB one. But, if I did:

* Emulators -- ePSXe being the key one. Nothing like being able to pop a PSX into the computer you're at by just finding a USB port. ZSNES (with Dragon Warrior 5 and 6 fantranslations) and a GB/NES emu as well. Not as interested in MAME as ZSNES, as you can fit more SNES games (and they're just about as fun) as Arcade games in the same space.

* Httrack, or at the very least a mirror of my favorite Japanese Manga artist's websites. Takahiro Awatake being the one I can think of off the top of my head.

* Putty, of course.

* Mozilla Firebird and my bookmarks.

* A backup of my website (~5 megs) and drawings (~100 megs). Can never have enough backups.

A 256 or 512 Pen drive would hold a 30 minute Anime episode quite nicely with ample room to spare. So if I was obsessing about some series that week, I'd probably have that on there too, suitably crunched and with the DivX and XviD codecs as well. If not, maybe a shrunken copy of Jungle Wa Itsumo Hale Nochi Guu Episode 1. ;)

You're wrong. Playstation emulation is possibly more advanced than N64 emulation; it's just that the games are so much bigger. See here for a usable PSX emulator.

Well, I can prove you wrong. ;)

The PSX emulation scene is quite mature and has been for some time. Emulators such as EPSXE for the PC and Linux are highly compatible with PSX games, nearing 98% compatible with all games.

PCSX2 is a Playstation2 emulator however, not a Playstation emulator, which is why it only runs a few demos. This is a port of its predecessor, PCSX, which is about on par with EPSXE.

"...all sorts of video games (if you know where to look).

That sounds cool. Where might I find information?

"...all sorts of video games (if you know where to look).

That sounds cool. Where might I find information?

You mean like this?

Go here and catch up on the modern emulation scene. There's a lot of crazy crap going on.

You could try running the PSX version in an emulator like epsxe. Other than that you only need a playstation bios and the old CDs. The backgrounds will still be in PSX resolution, but the polyogons will be rendered by hardware in any resoultion you want!

"with the sole reservation that they can't run Final Fantasy any more"

Let them have reservations no more! Just plop down a couple bucks for the Playstation version and download epsxe. FF7,8 and 9 all run like a dream on my Gentoo box (Tactics runs very well with some weird map oddities, but doesn't bother me). Need to play the SNES versions? They run picture perfect on ZSNES or SNES9x which both have excellent Linux ports and it's trivial to find the roms for FF2 - 6. NES emulators for Linux can get you the first one. After all, the PC versions of FF are just ports. :)

If you find a copy of the Bleem disc (good luck) you can play Metal Gear Solid on your Dreamcast with improved graphics.


Or you could use ePSXe.

The problem is there are other, free, emulators out there that do what Bleem does only better. ePSXe is the best one that comes to mind. Hard to charge for something that people can get for free.

Also, Bleem had a big problem in that the programmer wrote the WHOLE THING in 100% assembly. Ok, maybe that was cool in the Amiga days (that's what he used to program) but now it's just a bad idea. Windows API calls aren't any faster in ASM than in C++ and are a whole lot harder to work with. Had Bleem been rewritten as a C++ program with a few time critical things (like processor emulation) written is assembly it would have lost, at most, 5% or so speed and been a lot easier to maintain.

I know some people that got Bleem and were pissed because updates came out infrequently and really didn't fix all that many problem. The problem was that being written in all assembly made it a huge bitch to change and maintain. Had the bulk been C++ (or whatever HLL) I think it would have been much easier to maintain and update.

Last I saw, ePSXe seemed to be more compatible and ahve less glitches than Bleem. I find it unsupprising that Bleem died given that.

I heard ePSXe is a good alternative, but I haven't tried it myself. Try searching for 'ePSXe' on google.com. The official webpage 'http://www.epsxe.com/' doesn't seem to be up right now.