Lizstar

Gay Murr Girl

Liz, Goblin, Part-Time Shark, VTuber, retired speedrunner, author, GDQ staff, Sega fan, "Yuri Sommelier", Walking Encyclopedia of All Things Useless, Twitch partner, general menace. Says "Murr" a lot. This is not a place of honor, views my own, etc. Avatar art by me.


Does anyone here have a PS1 ODE? Because it's like, one of the only retro consoles I own that I don't have an ODE for yet and I wanna play more PS1 stuff.

What're the best PS1 ODEs to look into? There are a few options out there but I don't know any of the differences. PS1 isn't my wheelhouse. If you want to know all the different Sega Saturn ODEs, I'm your girl, but PS1 is lost on me and I'd love to explore it more lol


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in reply to @Lizstar's post:

The only PS1 ODEs available right now involve soldering and aren't ideal, IMO. Xstation works well but requires particular models of PS1 motherboards and the install SUCKS. You basically want someone else to install it for you. PSIO, don't even bother. It's a hot mess.

There's one that has been in development for a while already that will be plug and play, but it's not near release yet. IMO it's worth waiting for that, or saving up for one with an xstation already installed.

Do you need CDRs?

I have plenty of CD-Rs but I'm tired of the games not working properly cause they're on CD-R. I don't want to buy a whole new fucking console just in the hopes I get a better CD drive that can read my CD-Rs.

IMO it might be worth buying either used or as a clone, IF the third party software gets released. The original creator has completely gone off the rails and shouldn't be supported at this point, IMO. Plus there's a good chance any new revisions at this point will just have more anti clone/piracy/third party firmware features and nothing else.

My understanding, having not fully researched it, is the PSIO still has some serious compatibility issues with some titles, whereas xstation is significantly better in that regard. Citation needed, and I'm sure PSIO works fine for a large chunk of games (I'd hope).

Yeah, I'm not super involved. But I agree that it's probably not great to buy first party if it can be helped. And there's no guarantee community support would go very far. PSIO just came to my mind because it technically is a solution and that open-source firmware news is like two days old lol.

They only run this through POPstarter, which is emulation. I've not personally used it but I heard it was not great when I last looked it up. You can't actually use the PS1 hardware in the PS2 to run games via softmod because the PS1 CPU acts as the IO controller when not in PS1 mode, which is how the system communicates with the HDD and network.

If this has changed please let me know because I'd love to test it, it's been 4-5 years since I looked into PS1 loading on the PS2.

I actually have that setup. I couldn't get it working off network, unfortunately, and I don't have the kind of PS2 that can work with the HDD setup (I have a mini), it doesn't have the dock at the bottom. Games work over USB... SOME OF EM, most are just laggy nightmares. I got a cable specifically to work with network but I couldn't get it working to save my life lol

The Fenrir is a perfectly good choice. It's cheaper than the alternative, and works well, but needs a little bit of assembly.

The alternative is the Satiator, which is more expensive, is simply plug and play with no disassembly required, and allows you to still use your CDs. That's what I have cause I collect Saturn CDs lol but for most people, Fenrir will be the preferred option.

i have a decent collection of physical games but i've hit a point where the games i want are just not worth the price

the satiator being over $100 more than the fenrir was a factor since i can import another saturn for less than that if i really don't wanna constantly swap out parts

I also have been in the same place you are Liz. I've been eying the solutions for PS1 for years now. The only thing I can for sure with one hundred percent certainty say is ABSOLUTELY UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCE GET A PSIO. I've had 3 other friends get them and it's been a complete disaster. There's been weird issues with them. The people who are behind the PSIO are people who have no idea how to run a lot of things, let alone a business. One of these friends, who mind you is a very very technical person, had trouble with his working right. He was able to tell them in detail what was going on and after a month or two them giving him the run around, they just flat out said it was his fault and refused to acknowledge there was even a problem. There also is the matter of you'll have to do some modding in addition to installing the mod itself. I've not heard anything positive about it and have fully written it off as a solution. I'm still waiting for Terraonion to just finish the PS1 support for the MODE. Well, that or just someone else to do it. One option I heard about that sounds appealing but haven't looked into yet is that you can connect a raspberry pi to a PS2 with an ethernet cable and boot both PS1 and PS2 games that way. That's the most appealing option I know about but does involve getting your hands on a raspberry pi and setting up the software on it. From what I've heard, once you have it all set up it's pretty nice. Hope any of this helps :D