LinLog

A month or so ago, I decided to take advantage of the new hardware I bought this summer and take another go at an emulator I'd been playing with. I'm no stranger to emulators, but the this time I was interested in emulating a PlayStation, which took a bit more horse-power than my old system could manage.

The emulator in question, ePSXe, is a nice little cross-platform emulator with a GTK+ graphical interface (at least in the Linux port - I've never used it under Windows). However, it's rather hard to set up because the emulator itself doesn't actually do any useful work. All the graphics, sound, and joystick support are done through a plugin interface, and ePSXe doesn't come with a default set of plugins. Normally I would complain about how stupid this is, but since game console emulation is one of those legal gray areas, I'm willing to overlook this shortcoming.

I found a nice little tutorial on ePSXe to help me through the configuration process. The only part it didn't help with was finding a BIOS image, which I already had from playing around with it a couple of years ago.

There were a few snags I ran into in my ePSXe adventure. First, I was only able to get the SoftX video driver to work. The Mesa GL driver just froze the emulator on my system. I didn't play with it long enough to be sure, but I suspect it's related to my ultra-cheap 16MB Rage 128 video card.

My second problem was also related to video. There was a small but noticable lag when playing in my preferred mode - an 800x600 window. Apparently the video scaling just wasn't fast enough. The only way I could fix it was by dropping back down to low resolution. This, of course, required me to play in full-screen mode, because playing a game in a 320x240 window on a 15 inch monitor when you're near-sighted just isn't feasible.

So far, my experience has been mixed. Fortunately, I have had no trouble at all with Final Fantasy Tactics, which was the one game I really wanted to work. I've seen minor text glitches in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, but nothing big. The lack of a start button on my gamepad is more of a handicap than any bugs. However, Um Jammer Lammy was completely unplayable and I had some problems with PaRappa the Rapper (yes, I know they're both extremely lame, but I don't care). I haven't tried any other games yet, but apart from the Final Fantasy series, I don't own many other PlayStation games.

So, all in all, a good experience. I can play the one game I really cared about with state saving, so I'm happy.