Drastic Compression for PS1 games on PSP

Some informative information on playing PS1 games on your PSP has come to light. 1gig memory stick users should read on.

The following method should help to make PS1games run without all the extra padding originally placed on the disc. If you're wondering what that means, it's this: Imagine playing a 500MB game using only 50 MB of space.

You'll need something called CDGenPS2. If you follow the steps, you should be able to get a game to play with a drastically smaller file size. Its Still in the test Stages, but has proven to work on a number of games.

PS1 and PS2 games use a very strict architecture for how the binary files of the games are organized on a discs. When a disc copying program copies these discs, it's known that they will leave the padding of empty bits (0xFF) for the remainder of the XXXMB media.

For example, Tetris Plus for the PS1 has a total file size on the disc of 43.0 MB and the image from CloneCD is 566MB. However, if you try to remove the padding from a disc, it will no longer work with emulators, including POPS. A utility for those who load games from their PS2 hard drives to lessen the size of the images, known as CDGENPS2 (Much like UMD-GEN), has the ability to remove this padding and keep the structure of the disc intact. Using this utility with some software that can extract an ISO to its contents can bring the 566MB Tetris Plus image down to about 50MB (POPS compresses it to about 400MB).

How to do it:

1. Extract the ISO contents to a folder on your hard drive.
2. Open that folder and select ALL of the extracted contents from the root of the disc.
3. Open CDGENPS2.
4. Drag the contents of the folder into the CDGENPS2 window (the giant white space that says ISO near the top)
5. (Optional) Go to file-> Edit Volume and change the name of the volume so that it matches the original title of the game (for archival reasons only).
6. Click the IMG button on the left-hand side of the screen and save the Bin/ISO/IMG to whatever directory you want , and use POPS to convert to PSP EBOOT and test it.


Play around with CDGenPS2 and post up your results. You can download it right here (Windows users only). This software is Freeware.

Again, this is only in testing stages and some games may not work, but it cant harm to try ;)

This sounds realy good i'm going to go and try this now and hopefully this with help fit more of my PS1 games on my memory stick

yea once Im done with the downgrading of my GFs Brothers PSP, Im gonna do alot of testing with it tonight with my own PSP.

Wow...can't wait until this gets refined. (I'm assuming, of course that this is the kind of thing that makes a big enough stir to get itself refined.)

This is really awesome news if it works as well as hoped. Just imagine putting your WHOLE PS1 collection on one memory stick and still have room leftover for your PSP games :P

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vega

yea once Im done with the downgrading of my GFs Brothers PSP, Im gonna do alot of testing with it tonight with my own PSP.

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Don't worry the downgrade only takes 5 minutes so you'll be able to test away and hopefully get some smaller games on your memory card

yea, it would be awesome to hold every disc of FF IX on a single 1gig card... without lag. I'll post up my results when I get a chance :)

Anyone tested a game yet ?

After I make a new image in CDGenPS2, there doesn't seem to be a single bit of compression or anything removed. The ISO is just as big as before and doesn't compress any differently to PBP.

This is good, shame i dont use ps1 games on my psp

what version of cdgenps2 are you guys using because i can only find the older versions

sry i didnt see the d/l

This isn't doing much for most of the games I'm trying it on. You have to find the dummy files yourself in the program, it doesn't delete them automatically for you.

hm is my computer poo or what? how long does it take to compress an image? it starts for me then freezes up.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Wrrryyy

This isn't doing much for most of the games I'm trying it on. You have to find the dummy files yourself in the program, it doesn't delete them automatically for you.

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ah i see. that takes effort...i dont like effort ;P ill keep an eye on this and see if it evolves...

bad news guys, alot of the tests around the homebrew scene elsewhere is looking pretty dull . .

Tried it out with Crash Team Racing.

Followed the instruction.

No compression.

Didnt load.


I just did FF7 CD1

With CDGenPS2 PSXPSP game was 403MB
Without CDGenPS2 game was 529MB

Both are final PSXPSP games using 9 compression.

However, the CDGenPS2 game did not work. I either did something wrong or not all games work.


A Suikoden 2 ISO of 513 MB with lvl 9 popstation compression = 347MB
A Suikoden 2 ISO after this procedure = 436MB with a lvl 9 popstation compression to a 265MB eboot. However, the game doesn't want to load.


I started off with Final Fantasy Tactics... Here is what I did step by step.

1. Ripped the BIN file from my previous eboot.
2. Converted it to ISO
3. Compressed it using CDGENPS2
4. Using POPSTATION made an eboot compressed at level nine.

File Sizes:

Original: 529 Mb

Compressed: 200Mb!

The only problem is that after the Gameboot the game won't load. Anyone else having this problem?


got Capcom Vs Snk Pro down to 114megs with this plus popstation compression...but it wont load. what gives?

(also, later when I retried converting the files into bin instead of iso, I got 78 megs....but still no loading!!)


doesnt take a genius to work out that this isn't a very successful method. damn.

still, the more I read around, the more I see people using different methods and different results. seems slightly confusing. I'll post back in a minute.

ok I just tried this and managed to get one of my PSX games from 600mb to 60mb

what one?

Just tested with castlevania and capcom vs snk... no go results at all pbp are even bigger now...

one question though, when you rip to harddrive and copy incdgenps2 is there anything else besides saving and editing the name, dont you actually have to remove the padding once you r in manually or otherwise?

Well obviously the PS1 emulator on the PSP has vastly different architecture to that on the PS2. The PS2 after all is what this compression was made for. Its like opening a rar file with winzip.

ok heres a question if someone compresses a game to like 50mb and then emails me said game with keys could i then use said game and keys to run popstation? if so could someone do that?

Lol yes and no... one email box doesn t allow 50 megs transfers and second the games that compres that low dont work right now ;p

This Doesnt work i tried with makin my image iso bin nope doesnt work

I tried to compress Mtv Music Generator and there was no change. Tried Treasures of the Deep and took off about 45-50 mb's. Also tried Tenchu part 1 and there was no change.

whats the best method/program to convert a ps1 bin file to an iso file?

my prob is i got DIAL-UP!! so i cant dl the hotshots thing because it would take like 2 weeks. although it would be nice if someone could pm me a link to it so i could get someone else to dl it for me.. hehehe :D j/k.. or am i...?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by hallsguitar

my prob is i got DIAL-UP!! so i cant dl the hotshots thing because it would take like 2 weeks. although it would be nice if someone could pm me a link to it so i could get someone else to dl it for me.. hehehe :D j/k.. or am i...?

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*cough* inbox *cough*:D :rolleyes:

I cant get it to work...maybe im a noob maybe it doesnt work

Heres a little more info I posted earlier about reducing the size :P
http://www.dcemu.co.uk/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=48714

Ok sow ive got the contents of the CD into cdgenps2 but now what? do i just make an image? cuz ive done that and its come out the same size... have i missed something?

Nope i dont think you have, does the same thing for me... as of now it seems like bogus news... maybe i m wrong but if i am the steps of doing it are totally wrong. Anyway this software only wites mode 2 isos, it doesn t seem to remove any padding whatsoever... mostly used to edit or change iso content and write it back in mode 2...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by prinnyhero

Ok sow ive got the contents of the CD into cdgenps2 but now what? do i just make an image? cuz ive done that and its come out the same size... have i missed something?

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Did you change the conversion from .bin to .iso? Supposedly .Bin files don't work out to well.

I've been following this since yesterday ( posted on pspu last nigth) and apparently, none of the games work. So this method succesfully converts and in most cases, reduces the size dramatically, but as you've read from quotes that Vega has posted about what people are saying, not much success on playing the games yet.

I did this and it made the ISO larger by about 50mb.
What did I do wrong?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by taco111

I did this and it made the ISO larger by about 50mb.
What did I do wrong?

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Probably nothing. This method isn't really a playable method. Over at Pspu, theyve got 100 comments on this method but no playable trimmed games. So pretty much, the poster either missed out a step or this really is just in testing stages without any success. Most likely the latter.

guys, the success rate is somewhat low. for the moment you would maybe be best leaving this for now.
Apparently, someone did get R-Type down to around 80mb and it worked, but i stress the word "apparently".
I would have read abit more into this before posting it up. its a hit and miss method. hopefully i can snuff out some full detailed steps on how people got R-Type to work. for now, best sticking to popstation compression only.

I'll look into this tonight. Its posible there is data files one will need to remove since it's common for developers to put fake files to pad the image.

Yet for games like say FF7-9, this tool will do nothing (as their disc only contains a large data file).

God dammit ! PSMonkey! How have you been man? Havent heard from you in abit.

Yea I also read that big games (RPGs etc) wont make much difference via this method.

It does need some looking into, im gonna mess around with it too a litle later.

Sounds good if it will work, I will keep my eye on this one.

yeah, this method isn't really fool proof at all. lol. I tried MGS disc one and it made it 12 mb larger. so. maybe in the near future eh?

Tekken3 did not compress any using this program. I didn't bother running it through popstation afterwards.

Well, if not anything else, the idea behind this is pretty cool. A lot of games compress really well with popstation as it is but I know every little bit counts when you are using a 512MB or 1GB stick.

Perhaps something like this can be implemented into a nice program made specifically for PS1 games on PSP someday.

Lets not forget that it was only a couple weeks ago that we got the ability to play our PS1 games. In time, more good things will emerge I'm sure. Everything is still really new.

I replaced all the MUSIC?.STR files with blank STR files, and ran the resulting .bin from CDgen at compression lvl 9 file size went down from 457 Mb (Level 9) to 170 Mb.

PSP gives black screen.