PSIO Supposedly Working

I have three questions regarding the PSIO, or any other similar device that might emerge:

1) When this (or any other Playstation-runs-games-from-hard-drive-or-SD-card) is finished and working, would it be viable for it to run compressed images of games? I'd imagine so, at least from a hard drive, as the device (when a game is selected by the user) could unarchive the .zip/.rar/.7z file to a /temp/directory, and use the game disc image created in there, and of course the game image would be deleted from the /temp/ folder when a differenr game archive was to unarchived into there.

According to Wikipedia, the PSX has 2,418 games, which would take up (if my maths are correct) just over 1.5TB of hard drive space, assuming each disc image is uncompressed and takes up the full 650MB. Alright, so you could use a 2TB drive, and anyway I'm sure most PSX games take up much less than 650MBs of disc space, but even so I think the ability to run compressed roms would be handy, especially if used with an SD Card. Of course, most people won't want every game to be present, but some people might.



2) Will the PSIO allow auto-patching for the Playstation games? Such as fan translations, new levels, bug fixes, etc (such as at http://www.romhacking.net ). I think if the backup device software could apply these fixes 'on the fly' to disc images then that would be a useful feature - the disc image would simply be unarchived/copied to the /temp/ folder, the patch would be applied, and the game would then be run.


3. Will the PSIO be able to rip genuine PSX discs to the hard-drive/SD Card, or will we have to get our disc images some other way? The ability to rip game sisn't vital, as thanks to the Internet every PSX game is probably fairly easy to find and download, but if the PSIO (and any other PSX backup device) could rip games into a usable format then that wouldn't just be more convenient for the user, but would also give some degree of legitimacy to anyone who claims such devices are merely used for piracy, since users could argue (rightly) that some users would only use the device for images they'd created of their own (original) PSX game discs.

 

You can "rip" a PS1 game in a PC with ease.

 

I can't imagine you'd want to rip a PS1 game using a PS1, not only are they damned slow but at this point in time I'd find it questionable any of them could make a 1:1 copy.

 

It isn't very practical, you're right, but it's a convenience. If you have time, and you don't want to run back and forth with SD card, this is good choice to rip directly from PSX to SD card. This is like put CD in PSX, push some buttons and go for lunch.

 

I was gonna say, ripping a PS1 game with a PSX would be damn slow and impractical. I'd have to agree with APE as well, I wouldn't trust one to make a 1:1 copy at all. I'd rather rip it in a PC (2 mins tops) then go for lunch, rather than it taking about 30 mins and hammering my laser unit to death.

 

I didn't know that. I take it it just needs a normal CD/DVD PC drive to do this, nothing specific?

 

Why wouldn't it be possible for a Playstation to do this (if the PSX was running the right software, and had a storage device to write back to)? Surely the PSX can read all data of the disc, which I'd have thought is the only requirement. Alright, so as you and Xeauron say, it would be very slow (plus is wear and tear on the disc drive which would be better put on the easier to replace PC's disc drive), but surely it's still 100% possible?

 

PSX CD drive is 1x or 2x, I don't remember exactly, but that's like 20 times slower than PC. And for sake of laser head - yes, this is impractical.

 

I'd trust it more than your PC, which definitely can't create a 1:1 backup.

 

Just a quick update, the unit has shipped and should be en route to me now.
I'll likely be using a SCPH-5502 as I have a few of them to play with.
Here's the game list we are going with, sure some will not run at all.
It's just a plug and play review so I'll simply be trying to run what has been requested.

Game - Requested by
1. Tekken 3 - Fandangos
2. Dance Dance Revolution 5th Mix - carvax94
3. Final Fantasy 7 - superg
4. Ridge Racer Type 4 - Borman
5. Legend of Dragoon - BLUamnEsiac
6. Metal Gear Solid / Integral - Twimfy
7. MediEvil 2 - tehgazza
8. Chrono Trigger - sanni
9. Star Ocean - kuze
10. Tenchu: Stealth Assassins - PSPdemon
11. Resident Evil (Any) - braders1986

I'll also probably do Red Alert, Rollcage and anything else I remember.

 

Conker, my assumption is that you want the PSIO/PS1 to do as little as possible, i.e. just play the game, and save it. The only patching any flash-device does these days is some can do Game Genie codes. It's going to be a task just for them to get the games to run. Running a compressed game would not be smart for sure.

I'm not sure what they intend to offer in terms of potential hard drive support, either. But I expect you can load games from your PC via the USB port it will have. That should work well enough. As for the SD cards themselves, if the PSIO can read NTFS then you could perhaps use like a 64GB card, and fit a lot of games at once. If they're stuck with FAT32, that will suck, 4GB limits.

 

That's 4GB per file limit, not the whole card.

 

FAT32 supports up to 8TB, but I believe the built in formatting stops allowing you to format a drive to FAT32 at a much lower limit.

For hard drives you should use:
http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm

For SD cards you should use
https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/

 

or just use Linux

 

For the most part it should be but unless a handful of small copy protections and other oddities can be conquered via software you may have to resort to using a PC. Mostly speculation on my part as the PS1 isn't my area of expertise.

Fact is ripping with a PS1 would not be convenient nor terribly useful unless for some reason you have access to PS1 games but absolutely no way to get near a computer.

 

copy image of cd from ps1 )))) maybe only if you havent got pc... but it's slow, also i dont wanna define "write" data to sd card. cause i need make code for FAT32 , create file in FAT table... just copy image to sd card from pc is very easy. i better use ARM with usb2.0 device and you plug psio to pc via usb and write image to sd. or for make device cheaper better make it easy. sd card reader is quite cheap in markets.

anyway, all feature that you wrote above is possible. but at least i need make something simple for the beginning)))

 

...

 

I'd highly doubt this would support compressed images support, you'd need to extract the entire image each time you wanted to play that game.
Imagine how long it took in say 1999 to extract a 700MB zip file, now imagine that taking about 100 times longer because you're using a low powered FPGA and possibly hardware or software MCU.

 

dont forget about modern ARM - 200...800 mhz.. or more, double core.
the question is - who are ready pay more for all this feature and how much.

 

A very valid question! Compromises must be made to satisfy the masses on value vs features.
Glad I'm not in that seat having to decide... :tranquillity: