I have a rule that I won’t get into a computer game until I can play it on my computer for free (I am a passionate advocate of both Free Software and piracy, so the idea of paying for anything is anathema to me). I grew up playing ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 games on an old PC, then I moved up to a SNES emulator when my hardware improved. Recently, it struck me that my computer was probably capable of emulating a Playstation.
I thought I’d make a post about how I got it to work, in case it could be useful to anyone else. I use Linux Mint Debian edition. I imagine a lot of these instructions will be applicable for other Linux distributions (especially Debian and Ubuntu).
Installing the emulator was the easiest part. I used PCSX Reloaded, which is, helpfully, in the Debian repositories. So all I had to do was type:
sudo aptitude install pcsx
at the command line, and it popped up in my main menu. If you are using a different distro without the emulator in the repositories, there are instructions for installation on the PCSX Reloaded website.
Getting the game I wanted to play was a bit more annoying. Emuparadise is a great website for ROMs and things. I wanted to play Spyro the Dragon, since I was always a bit jealous of my friend at school who played it. I downloaded the .rar file and extracted it by opening it with the Archive Manager (you might have to install the “unrar” package to do this).
The game file was called:
Spyro the Dragon [NTSC-U] [SCUS-94228].bin.ecm
I renamed it Spyro.bin.ecm for the sake of ease of use. The path to this file in my case was:
/home/user1/Spyro.bin.ecm
Now, PCSX can use .bin files, but I need to un-ecm it first. Someone’s made a handy group of tools for this, which you can download from here. Download the source code and unpack it all into a folder. Navigate to the folder in a terminal window and type:
cd src
gcc -o ecm ecm.c
./ecm d /home/user1/Spyro.bin.ecm /home/user1/Spyro.bin
Then you can open the .bin file by starting PCSX and going to “File > Run ISO”. Use the arrow keys for directions, and the other keys are:
v = start
c = select
z = cross
x = circle
s = square
d = triangle
w = L1
r = R1
e = L2
t = R2
And just like that, you’ve reached the dizzying heights of 1998 gameplay. Whee!