PSOne Emulator for PSP – Massive Back Catalogue Looms

[wraggster]

Source Spong (http://news.spong.com/article/9781)

Speaking at the PlayStation meeting, Sony Computer Entertainment chief Ken Kutaragi confirmed long-standing rumours that a massive PlayStation back-catalogue will come available for the PSP. Read the full report on all the PSP announcements here.

Since then, some further details have emerged regarding SCE's plans to monetise its pre-existing IP. The only comments to date from official sources have confirmed first-party titles will be available, though it's a certainty that the third-parties still in existence and not bound by over-complex mergers agreements will queue up to cash in.

The games will be made available in digital form only and distributed via the web from a soon to be announced Sony portal. They will be bought 'for keeps' by consumers and stored on Sony Memory Stick, with users able to keep a single game for as long as he or she feels fit.

Several Japanese retailers have indicated to SPOnG that Sony will sell new SMS cards in stores, each coming with a specified number of game download credits, though we are unable to add anything more to this at time of press.

One uncertainty is how Sony will keep the rampant PSP hacker community from pulling apart its legitimate operation. With the PlayStation games in ROM form, a significant investment into digital security will be required if the IP is to escape the hackers and subsequent illegal, revenue-free distribution via torrent and peer-to-peer groups.

Expect the full skinny on this interesting take on PSP sideways and back a bit compatibility to emerge at E3 if not a shade before.

A Full on PSOne Emulator running at full speed on the PSP Will be awesome, what i would hope is that those of us who already have the legal versions of the games would somehow be able to transfer them to the Mem Card under some type of validation process. Isnt it Funny that Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft are now using Emulators on there new consoles, maybe we should petition for a patent :P

[P_O_M]

You know, that patent idea is a clever one, but knowing Sony and the bigshots, they are probably in the process already!

OMG! FF& on the PSP, SWEET!

[Psphreak]

Finally Dammit!! :)

[Squidman]

This is awsome!!!! Hopefully it won't require a firmware update, that wuld suck.

Yay! MGS...portabalized!

[felonyr301]

are you on crack of course it will require higher firmware thats a given come on guys THINK!!!

[TheEmulatorGuy]

Wow, you took that completely out of context. There is no emulator, they are porting the games to PSP. I suggest you read everything in the press conference and you'll find that they never even mentioned "emulator". And as another note, PlayStation games are CD games, not catridges, therefore they can't be in ROM form. They must be in ISO form. Do you really think Sony would throw away their games in ISO format? No. The games are being ported.

[pepegomez]

Wow, you took that completely out of context. There is no emulator, they are porting the games to PSP. I suggest you read everything in the press conference and you'll find that they never even mentioned "emulator". And as another note, PlayStation games are CD games, not catridges, therefore they can't be in ROM form. They must be in ISO form. Do you really think Sony would throw away their games in ISO format? No. The games are being ported.
true! but i think our beloved hackers will do the job and get us those ported games :P

[pspvik]

these games being "unhacked" is unevitable. there will be some way that they will be exploited

[omniosiris]

wha.....this makes no sense....they must be simply porting games, there are wayyy to many problems with manking an emu and selling roms
A) whos gonna buy them?! lets say you want to get the FFVII ISO/rom...its over 2GB!!!!!! that means you have to pay around $30 for the rom, and $200+ for a mem stick to hold it!, uhhh no thanks
B) with the massivie amount of hacking thats happened for PSP sony isn't gonna put sumthing like this out there, it would be so easy for people to disect it and then just play illigal playstation ISO's with it
C) the downloads, Sony would have to set up some kind of download system that makes it immposible to give the iso/rom to someone else once you buy it....thats reallly hard to do
In conclusion I would really like to see PSone games on PSP, but I really hope sony just ports them...it would be so much easier and make alot more sense (and cost about $200 less for people that don't own a 2GB mem stick)

[Voltron]

Scary to see Sony do something that might make sense for once. I'm giddy about the idea of playing PSOne games on PSP. By the end of the year 8GB Pro Duo sticks will be out and the new PSP will have 4GB internal storage.

It will be interesting to see how it plays out. But I'm not abandoning the homebrew scene and upgrading.... EVER. Of course this will require firmware updates.

PacManFan, where art though?

[Datre32]

... they would be "ROMs" because of the extensive reencoding to cut size, this is probably more for games like parappa the rappa than any ff game.

they wouldnt charge $30 for them, maybe 10-15 pending on the game size and quality

however long it take for this to happen, id gladly upgrade my 1.0 for this

[mog]

id gladly upgrade my 1.0 for this
Ditto... this is probably the first thing that has made me even consider updating from 1.0 :p

Also im very sure the final fantasy 7 rom is less than 2 gb. I think it is smaller than a UMD.
The third disk is pretty empty + the rom could be hacked to remove movies and stuff if necessary anyway.

[Valiant]

where is pacmanfan...he kinda said he had plans then VANISHED off the face of the planet.

[RedKing14CA]

everyone knows about this... sony confirmed it too...

You guys are freaking out over nothing....

And about the FFVII being 2GB... The playstation one only took 700Mb cd's... so you would get like 4 ISO's... 4 different ISO's on your psp's one at a time... from what i know

[so_cal_forever]

I'm not majorly concerned about the first party games. I'm concerned about 3rd parties, more to the point: Square Enix, Konami, Atlus, etc...

[iniquitous_beast]

for the love of god, those of you who own 1.00 psps, Please Don't Update! If you want the new features, sell your 1.00s on ebay and use the revenue to buy someone else's 2.60 to update. 1.00 psps are becoming increasingly rare; thus they will become more and more sought-after as time passes. Don't throw away such a rare firmware in exchange for the newest thing Sony throws at you.

More on topic: Assuming that Sony puts any minor effort into converting these games over to psp, games such as FFVII will actually have smaller file sizes. On the PS1, multiple-disk games often had a lot of duplicate data on each disk. That way, players wouldn't need to constantly swap disks back-and-forth as they traversed the world. I imagine that when sony ports such games, they will combine the game data into one continuous file, and eliminate a lot of excess duplicate data. The final result will be the same games taking up much less space than they did on the ps1.

[PlayingKarrde]

I don't know why people aren't concerned about this, maybe just blinded by the fact that they will be able to play PS1 games on the PSP, but there is one slightly large issue and that that the PSP is missing 2 buttons and one analog stick...

OK, so the analog stick isn't such a big deal as the dual sticks came in late into the PS1's life cycle and not too many games actually supported both, but the missing R2 and L2 buttons could cause serious problems with many games. Sure you can get away with it on some games, but others will be pretty unplayable. I don't want to see some form of double button press in order to get an R2 or L2... Then there is L3 and R3, but they weren't really ever used anyway.

[mog]

for the love of god, those of you who own 1.00 psps, Please Don't Update! If you want the new features, sell your 1.00s on ebay and use the revenue to buy someone else's 2.60 to update.
Damn, thats a great idea! :cool:
I doubt i would update anyhow. FF7 on a psp would be worth spending couple hundred quid for a second psp! :p