The Playstation (Original) has a little bit of interesting programming information. I have had the time to mess around with my PS1 cd-roms (In this case, making images of the cds) But the other day, about say, a year ago, I popped one of the Namco Museum games I have into a computer at home, and I found a little something interesting, and that was that I could see .exe files, but they weren't playable. I figured that. But after further investigation, these little files are useful with PS1 games. They were never used after that, but I have through personal experience found that these are useful for emulation. Namco used these throughout their PS1 games. I have also seen these strung along as the title of BRIDGE.EXE and TOGAME.EXE (which are the loading screens) These files weren't just used in Namco games. If I remember correctly, Lunar 2 Eternal Blue Complete used one, and there are a few others that used them, but I can't remember right now. These are not the original games, but simply copied into files that the PS1 can run. The Ps1 I don't think could handle all of the file types that the PS2 could handle, but that was how they were able to put the games on the Ps1 for emulation. I have not figured out how to decode or run these files under just windows. You can use ePSXe to run the PS-EXEs, but I only recommend that if you have the games. That is the end of a little information of PS-EXEs, and that is all that I have information of right now.
This is a common thing for PS1 titles. The Playstation executable is generally the file with the game's product code. Usually it would be like SLUS917.44 (this ID doesnt exist but it's PS1/PS2, Licensed, US, Retail release) for example. While that file looks to be almost nothing of value, it's actually a Playstation executable, just not renamed to exe. In fact you can likely change the name of the file to exe once again (and edit system.cnf to use the newly renamed file not the product code - i havent had much success but i know it's possible in come cases but not all) and it would still run. Here's a picture of Megaman Legends 2's executable in a hex editor. At the top you can see it's a specific executable for the PSX (which was the PS1's internal codename for some reason). If you dropped one of those into a hex editor you'd probably see the same. Furthermore, there's ways to make multidisc games and they call for an PS1 exe, which is cool because you can rename these things and it will likely be able to work as a multidisc if you made one.
Cool. I do though think that the reason that Namco Museum Encore (see pictures above) has a abundancy of exes is because the game was already big (Looking at the properties of the disc, the game is about 638mb, which is almost all of the cdrom) and the exes can *I think* hold the compressed audio, because unlike the other volumes, I cannot find the tracks for the museum at all, and after a through searching with a little Parallel I/O cheat device (in my case, a gold finger) and playing all of the xa files, I could only find the title screen theme, which was strangely buried in one of the games (arcade game) xa files, and that was kinda strange, but this was a useful thing for games, because (I guess?) it can compile files. The only reason that they didn't have an actual museum was again, the fact that the games already took up almost all of the CD. I'm not going to rant on any longer, but tthe fact that Gran Turismo is now on the list of games that use PS-EXEs. And thanks for the information about the Hex Editor, because then you can run a game with your own files and then play that game on a PS1, after some either modding, or like me, use a cheat device to load the legit game boot code, and then play your game, but I think I've been rambling long enough.
Multiple exe files is pretty common, they are often used as overlays. You can have (for example) 512k of common code that stays in memory the whole time and then another set of 512k files that are loaded in depending on what the game needs at the time. The file extensions are irrelevant, so you can't always tell without looking at the main executable (which also won't necessarily be an .exe). They can also use a custom format, so they won't necessarily have a PS-X header on them.
I just want to point out that file extentions mean nothing, just cause it says exe doesn't make it special.
Yeah, I just did this for a guide to what these are, since people can get confused, and think that these are windows executables. You know, not everyone is like us, knowing this stuff and all.
