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Introduction...
and welcome :)
*
Time goes by... many years ago, late 1998, I decided to release my first psx
emulation related project on my small homepage. It never got boring
since, I've met a lot of nice, interesting and talented people all
around the world because of my hobby, and over 11 million visitors were
counted during this timespan.
Now finally I've decided to move to my own domain... more place, more
features (though basically I don't need or use those, I have to admit,
I am still trying to keep the site design as simple as possible), and
more independence (bye, bye, german telecom). And still no ad banners,
no popups, no paypal (wow... funny marketing minds... combining "pay"
and "pal", oh my) or whatever.
Most
stuff you can
find here is related to my hobby, PSX emulation... the basic idea is to
take one of your original Playstation1 (PSX) game CDs, insert it into
your PC's cdrom drive, start an application (the 'emulator') and play
the game on your PC... easy, isn't it? :) Some emulators will allow you
to have additional features (like better graphics, or save states,
unlimited mem cards, netplay...), on the 'bad side' all of them will
suffer from compatibility issues (some games will not run at all, or
sound/graphic/input problems will happen).
There
are two
commercial psx emulators: VGS and Bleem! VGS is the most compatible
emulator available, but you will only get the 'basic' features (no
enhanced graphics, no iso support), and after Sony has bought VGS, I
don't think there will be any updates anymore.
Bleem! offers a D3D display, but the compatibility is low, and the
gameplay is no fun most times (speed problems, sound problems, gfx
problems... you name them...). Bleem! hasn't seen updates for years,
it's rumored the Bleem! team is working on a Dreamcast version of the
psx emulator, but I wonder if you will need a Dreamcast emulator by the
time they will release it (because at this time there will be no
Dreamcast console anymore ;) * small update: bleemcast has been
released, each bc disk is supporting one special psx game * small
update #2: Bleem!, the company, is no more...
Luckily
there are
some freeware psx emulators as well... Psyke and PSEmu Pro were the
first among them, both are discontinued, but the (nowadays enhanced)
PSEmu Pro plugin system is still alive and kicking :) The plugins are
emulating a special part of the psx hardware (the GPU for graphics, the
SPU for sound, CDR for accessing the cdrom drive and PAD plugins for
the keyboard/joypad input handling). Nowadays the best known PSX
emulators are PSEmu Pro, ePSXe, PCSX, AdriPSX and FPSE (and there are
even more freeware psx emus in development :), and most of them can use
the PSEmu Pro plugin system. Also smf of the MAME/MESS fame is doing a
great job with psx based emulation lately, so keep an eye at that emus
if you are a fan of 'pure' (VGS alike) psx emulation.
OK,
so you need a)
the main emulator, b) some plugins which suit your PC hardware and c) a
PSX BIOS file. The PSX BIOS is copyrighted by Sony, you need an
original psx console, an action replay module and a link cable to get
the BIOS from your console... or you do an internet search for getting
the file, but still: you need an original psx console to use it legally
(remark: never ask any emu author for the BIOS... forget it). Ah, and
d) you will need at least one working psx game cd, of course.
And
that's what my
page is about :)
Btw,
if you are
interested in psx emulation, the best starting point for getting the
emulators, plugins, latest news, FAQs, forums and so on is:
www.ngemu.com
Give
it a try...
and have fun! :)
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