Playstation Classic announced

[Demon Cleaner]

Playing PSX games on my PS3 with smoothing on. Why exactly would I need this?

[Harrison]

Exactly, every Playstation has been able to play PSX games. As I said before it's aimed at the causal gamers from when it originally came out whom for rid of it, see this release and feel the nostalgia to play it again.

The only real bonus is no physical media and a very compact system that connects via hdmi with usb controllers.

[Demon Cleaner]

And quite portable I guess.

[Harrison]

Definitively portable. Maybe good for a bit of multiplayer after the pub as you can just take it with you easily.

As I said before I would only be interested if it gets hacked. Would make a nice little system to run titles with solid state storage.

[Technooke]

Very cool, will it still run with the old school games or only the new feature games?

[Harrison]

It's a fixed platform system the same as the recent Nintendo minis. Plug and play. It plays the same as the original and will come with 20 of the best games from the system built in, identical to how they were when originally released.

[Harrison]

This has now been released. £89 in the UK.

Many are moaning about the selection of games included. But more so retro gamers are moaning about the complete lack of customisation! If you look at the Nintendo mini systems they provide settings such as adding emulated scanlines. The PlayStation classic has nothing. It loads in 16:9 upscaled resolution, and with most Playstation games originally for 4:3 aspect ratio, so it stretches out the image. If your TV has the settings you might be able to make the TV force the screen to a 4:3 and squash it back, but that's annoying. Equally if you have a UK one you are locked to a PAL bios and 50hz output. All modern lcds can run 60hz. Big oversight!

But there is hope. Someone discovered if you plus a USB keyboard into the console and press the Escape key it takes you into the emulator's settings menu! This gives instant access to scanline generation, selecting ntsc or pal bios, as well as options to load CD images (although not currently worked out how to load images.. maybe just plugging a usb stick in? Would be mad if it were that simple! Shows Sony have been a bit lazy because they are basically just running the standard Playstation emulator without customising it at all. All they needed to do was bind Select+Start to the Escape key settings link.