A nice PSX emulator....

Having tried bleem, VPS, and one or two others, I was sort of disappointed with the PS emulators out there, especially since they can't play stuff I'd burned/downloaded. But there's an emu I just tried called epsxe that works pretty decently, and it plays backups/roms as well as originals. The nice thing about it is that the sound and video emulation is all plugin based, which means if you don't like one guy's attempt to emulate the sound and gfx, you can try someone else's, and keep trying until you find something that works properly.

You will also need scph1001.bin from http://www.aldostools.com/psxemus.html
to get the emu running. Note that you need to legally own a PS to use the PS bios.

So far I've been trying it with final fantasy tactics and front mission 3. Results on various video settings:
p.e.o.ps fullscreen 320x240 no scanlines - nice, clear, runs some stuff a little fast and has some very minor artifacts here and there, but mostly is fine.

E}I{'s Soft Driver K6/P1MMX 0.98 - looks good, but the popup menu in FFT is invisible. Doh.

Pete's D3D Driver 1.67
Pete's DX6 D3D Driver 1.67 (smoother spc fx than above)

Both look really really nice, it uses smooth antialiased polys that look better than what you'll see on the PS2. The sprites are drawn correctly and look better in a 640x480 window than they do fullscreen. The only problems are that during flashy animations the game slows way down(summons in FFT for example) and when the screen palette is altered (like everything fades to blue during the opening of a chapter or the end of one) you get the same issue.
Also the sound is run at 10,000 mph during the opening CG, but my experience is that all the graphics renderers either do the CG correctly, then the rest of the game is screwed up, or do the CG with messed up sound/too fast, then the rest of the game is fine. Obviously the latter is preferable.
The last one on my list is much less chuggy during complex sprite animations, though not as good as the PS2 itself.

Sound overall is weird. It seems closely tied to the quality of the graphics. Like during menu screens sound speeds way up, but during battles or cutscenes it's relatively normal. Not all of the sounds are correctly done, but the music is fine so I don't worry too much about the SFX.

Anyway, have a good time playing those PS classics.

 

nice to know you finally unzipped my rar /versus/images/icons/tongue.gif

 

This PS emulator has been out for ages so make sure you get the latest version. You should take note that any 2D game like street fighter altha, Abes oddasy etc will run ultra fast because the default emulator frame rate is set to 200 fps, depending on your speed of your PC (Kill yourself if you have less than 500mhz) run the config wizard and tweak it down every 30 frames to find a suitable speed.

 

what's funny is I didn't, myke told me about it and I forgot about the rar and re-downloaded.