How to Play Playstation (psx) Games on Your PC

Although some newer consoles on the market today are still a far reach from being emulated by the PC, thankfully come older consoles have long been successfully emulated. These include what we would now consider as being ‘archaic’ systems – the NES, SNES, Gameboy Color, to name a few. But the modern computer is also able to emulate the more advanced consoles such as the PSX and N64 (of course, ‘advanced’ is a relative term, because compared to the graphics quality and processing power of the newer generation consoles, those older consoles are nothing).

In this article I will discuss how to successfully emulate PlayStation games on your PC. First, you will need either an original PlayStation game CD or an image of one. I recommend making image files of any original CD’s you may want to emulate, because images are a) faster to load and b) quieter!

To make an image, you will need a free (for a certain time limit) program called Alcohol 120%. Making the image is a relatively simple process. Insert the CD into your disk drive, go into Alcohol 120% and click on ‘Image Making Wizard’. From the drop down preset settings, choose ‘PlayStation’ and then simply wait for the image to be created. How easy was that?

To run the games, you will need a PlayStation emulator. The undisputed champion in that area is a free program called ePSXe. It allows you do use different plugins to customize the way the game looks and sounds to your liking. If you have an older system, you can lower the grapchics/sound quality to make the game run faster. The plugin I prefer for graphics is Pete’s OpenGL2 Driver. The sound plugin I use is the Eternal SPU Plugin. If I want to run a CD, I simply use ePSXe’s core plugin (only because I don’t run CD’s very often).

Once you have ePSXe open, you can click on Config > Video, or Config > Sound to select different plugins and tweak them to your liking. Keep in mind that external plugins like Pete’s and Eternal come separately from ePSXe, and must be placed in the ‘plugins’ folder within the ePSXe directory in order to function.

To run a PlayStation image file with the settings you selected, go to File > Run ISO. If the game runs too slowly, drop some of the video/sound settings down a bit.

Here are some helpful links to simplify this process:

• Alcohol 120% official site
• ePSXe at The Emulator Zone
• ePSXe plugins at NGEmu