Friday Post: Playstation Emulation on the Raspberry Pi!

EDIT: UPDATED BINARIES HERE – FULL SPEED ACHIEVED!

Hey All!

Happy Friday!  This week brings some really cool things for the Raspberry Pi.  First up, we have a Playstation Emulator that works under X in on the Pi.  It’s called PCSX, it’s OpenGL ES enabled, and while it’s not runnign at full speed, it’s a really cool display of the technology that can be powered by the Pi.  Binaries and Instructions below.

Download PCSX Binaries

To use this you will need CD ISO’s of your backed up PSX games stored on the SD card.

  1. Make sure you in a windowed environment.  If you are just on the command line, use the command startx.
  2. Double click on LXTerminal on the desktop or open it from the application menu at the bottom left.
  3. From the LXTerminal, type cd ~/ to get to your home directory.
  4. wget http://sheasilverman.com/rpi/raspbian/pcsx.zip
  5. unzip pcsx.zip
  6. cd pcsx
  7. chmod +x pcsx
  8. ./pcsx
  9. Use up and down to navigate the menus.
  10. Select Load, then navigate the directory where you saved the CD image
  11. Select your game then press enter
  12. ENJOY!!!

This emulator is far from perfect on the Raspberry Pi.  Some games won’t work, frame rates are wild, and it can be a bit frustrating, but who cares!  It’s a freakin’ Playstation emulation on the Raspberry Pi!

Second cool thing to come out today is an announcement from the Raspberry Pi foundation.  They are now selling licenses to enable MPEG-2 and VC-1 decoding, as well as H.264 encoding (free?) and CEC support!

I’m not sure how the license system works since it is somehow tied to your Pi’s serial number, but you can purchase them at the Raspberry Pi store.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

 

10 thoughts on “Friday Post: Playstation Emulation on the Raspberry Pi!

  1. So what are the chances of this getting “full speed” or becoming a smooth operational tool for daily gaming =P. Because I still have all my PSX games, and i’d love to store them on a single drive and play them off the RPi. Thanks for your efforts =D! and the install guide.

    • At the moment, PCSX only works on with the desktop environment. If it can be made to work on the CLI, I bet performance would increase

  2. Hi all, hope you don’t mind me adding to this post , I’ve have just tried this version of PCSX its labelled as pcsx_rearmed , from the source location git://notaz.gp2x.de/~notaz/pcsx_rearmed.git

    I’ve compiled this and it runs ( other than sound issues ) really well , so much so I’ve been playing ridge racer for hours 🙂 , and better still it runs from the console for that little extra bit of speed.

    Give it a go
    CodenameV

  3. This is the part I am having trouble with “To use this you will need CD ISO’s of your backed up PSX games stored on the SD card.”

    When I already have the OS on the card how do I put the ISOs on it?

    • The easiest way is if you have SSH installed. Look up tutorials on using SCP. If on Windows I used Filezilla and on Mac I use Cyberduck.

      • Thanks for the quick response! That was easy enough to do.

        I feel like I am close to getting it running, but I keep getting an error message: menu_load_config:failed to open ./.pcsx/cfg/SLUS00619-SLUS00619.cfg
        menu_load_config:failed to open ./.pcsx/pcsx.cfg

        Does this mean I am missing files or something else? Thanks again for your help!

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