Hey all,

The launch of the Red Ash (totally not Mega Man Legends(TM)) kickstarter has made me want to finally go back and finish Mega Man Legends 2. I still have all my old PSX stuff, but do not really have an easy way to hook up my launch PSX currently.

I haven't dealt with emulating a PSX in a long time. Used to be that ePSXe would let you run games directly from disc, but it's not very accurate to what I understand. I even went through the big hassle of dumping my own bios to do everything legimate (as emulation can be).

I heard RetroArch/Mednafen is good, but hooooly crap is it a pain in the butt to set up. No save states, no easy way to toggle analog mode, and as far as I can tell, no direct disc reading? I really don't want to have to dump my discs as well.

Are there better alternatives? Is ePSXe still good? is there a way to make Retroarch not a hassle? I am not looking for 100% accurate emulation, I intend to heavily up the resolution, and would like to use some kind of HQ3x filter, if possible.

Gotta getcherself some of that hot Bleem! action...

@mlarrabee: Surprisingly, I got the Bleemcast Metal Gear Solid and Gran Turismo discs out of a bargin bin forever ago. That whole story is crazy.

emulation is always going to be a huge pain in the ass, especially for anything post snes/genesis. if you're not super attached to the idea of upping the resolution or using filters and have access to a ps3, that can play ps1 discs just fine. i dunno about ps4s though.

i'm pretty sure epsxe still has the option to play discs and works mostly fine, though.

my old fat ps3 emulates most ps1 game discs fine.

He's asking about PC emulators - how is your this supposed to help him?

ePSXe .... google some stuff for all the plug ins youll need, usually works pretty good for me though, fairly certain you can play off putting the cd in your pc as well.

ePSXe is pretty solid. Depending on what plugins you use and how you configure it, you can opt for making it more accurate or rendering it at a higher resolution, filtering textures, etc.

PCSX-R is also a pretty good option. It has the upside of being totally open source and using an Internal HLE BIOS so that you don't have to do any additional work to get it running. That "port" of N2O that was released on Steam recently actually uses a slightly modified version of PCSX-R.

Wow, I just checked the Steam page and you're right. That is one quick and dirty port.

I used to use ePSXe and never had any issues, but I've never tried it with actual discs.

ePSXe works perfectly fine for me, and it was updated as recently as this year. Most of the information you may need about plug-ins, BIOS, and settings is readily available, too.

I got the Bleem Gran Tourismo disc too. In fact I and spent a day comparing Bleem software against PS2's native PSX backwards compatibility. I think Bleem did a nicer job of it using Dreamcast. I could be mis-remembering but I recall PS2 put some artifacting around objects with transparent textures....the transparent bit would show up as ghosting. In my opinion Bleem would have been pretty cool...but I saw Sony point too.

@silver-streak: how much did you end up picking up MM Legends 2 for, by the way? man, I payed like 120 bucks for it....

@travisrex: I am only a "collector" of video games as I don't sell my old stuff. I have every video game I've purchased since the 3DO/PSX era. I was lucky with MML2, in that I bought it after it had been out for a bit. Maybe $30?

I seem to have a few games like that. Suikoden II, Tron Bonne, Marvel vs Capcom, Valkyrie Profile, Lunar Silver Star Collection.

Edit: Looking at Suikoden II...I've never even opened it. It's still shrinkwrapped (My backlog is preeeettty far-reaching. I also have an unopened copy of Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth)

Personally I despise emulators that require plugins and messing with a million settings, stuff like ePSXe and PCSX.

There are a couple that don't require any, but out of those the only one I know FOR SURE has disc drive capability is 'pSX' aka 'psxfin'

Just note a couple things, you still need a bios, it's old and while it supports most games there are compatibility issues that haven't been resolved since it's last update, and it has no beautification options.

It does have savestates and a fast forward option though.

for others who don't need disc drive reading:

Mednafen is probably the current most accurate emulator, but is a pain to set up on it's own, luckily if you get Retroarch it includes mednafen as it's ps1 core, so you can use the retroarch gui to load games and change settings, the more recent dev build added savestate support but I don't know if it's worked it's way into main releases.

@viciousreiven: Yeah, no worries on Bios (unless they need a specific one). I actively ripped my PSX and PS2 bios (Is that also the the plural of Bios?) years ago. Same with my 3DO.

Who worries about accuracy with PS1 games? They look hideous regardless.

@sinusoidal: I care about accuracy in regards to CPU emulation, as it means better compatibility and less weird quirks. Graphics accuracy is definitely not crucial, as I intend to HQ4x all textures and supersample the resolution. I've tested ePSXe doing something similar, and since MML basically uses a variation of cel-shading (simple textures), they up-res incredibly well. It pretty much looks like a current game, just with simple models.