First of all, if you have an iPhone 3G, you don’t need to read further – games are just too slow. The situation is somewhat better on the second-generation iPod Touch because of the faster CPU. Nevertheless, few very-very games run playable on even the 2nd-generation iPod Touch.
If, on the other hand, you have a 3G S and you definitely want to play some titles, you might want to read on.
In order to emulate the Playstation, you’ll need the following:
- If your phone isn’t already jailbroken, jailbreak it
- Search for and install pxs4iphone in Cydia
- Upload your decompressed ROM images (supported file formats are .ISO, .IMG, .BIN, .Z and .ZNX.) into /var/mobile/Media/ROMs/PSX/
- Get "scph1001.bin" from HERE
- Start pxs4iphone, select the ROM image, the orientation and whether you need sound (the latter is stuttering with most titles and is, therefore, useless)
- Play (or, at least, try to play…)
Very few (if any) PSX games run at their full speed. I think reports like “Fullspeed or at least 90% (but start up screens are slow)” (that of NFS Porsche Unleashed) HERE, in the official Wiki page are greatly exaggerated – the game is far from it and is barely playable. (Native iPhone games are waaay faster and they may also make use of other control methods like the accelerometer; in addition, they make full use of the screen estate, as opposed to the 320*240 center area utilized by pxs4iphone.)
I’ve produced two 30 fps videos showing NFS Porsche Unleashed and Frogger running on my 3G S. They’re available HERE (NFS Porsche Unleashed). The Frogger video will only be posted later. (It takes ages to upload a 200 Mbyte AVI file to YouTube from home.)
All in all, you will only want to play games like Final Fantasy VII – that is, titles (or any similar ones) not being natively present on the platform.
UPDATE (1/3/2010): An article comparing the new, 1.1.0 version (released in late November) of the emulator to the just-released FpseCE 0.10 running under WinMo with some remarks on compatibility and a demo video showing some games in action on both the iPhone 3G S and a WinMo PDA, the Dell Axim x51v:
Nevertheless, last Christmas (a few days ago), it was, finally, released to the public and I need to say it’s indeed as good as expected.
It's available for download HERE. It doesn't necessarily need a ROM BIOS file, unlike psx4iphone on the iPhone.
I’ve run several compatibility and comparative speed tests. For example, I compared to the also pretty new (version 1.1.0 was released in late November 2009) psx4iphone running the emulator on the iPhone 3G S. (Note that, despite what some people state, psx4iphone is plain useless on previous-generation devices, as is also explained in my article on the previous (1.0.0) psx4iphone version
Note that it’s not only with emulating the Playstation that Windows Mobile is (currently) certainly better at. The same states for all(!) other emulated platforms – the emulators are just far better, faster, featureful and more powerful for Windows Mobile than for the iPhone (even including the superfast iPhone 3G S). I, for example, haven’t reported (in a separate article) on the currently released version 1.2 / 1.3 of the Commodore 64 emulator. (Please see my remarks on the playability of Uridium
As has already been mentioned, the emulation speed is roughly the same on the four-year-old Dell Axim x51v (which, CPU/GPU-wise, is exactly the same as the one-year-older Dell Axim x50v) than on the iPhone 3G S (the latest and greatest iPhone with a really powerful CPU and GPU) running the latest (and, to time, greatest and fastest) psx4iphone version. For example, Gran Turismo
Medal of Honor
In the demo video, I’ve also made a quick demo (at the end of the video) of showing Assault Rigs
Note that all this has been measured without any tweaking of the x51v – I haven’t tried modding the ini file to speed up emulation.
By the way, does anyone know how to make Metal Slug X work (that is, entering ‘1’ or ‘2’ players?) Based on the in-game demo, it seems to be even faster than under masterall’s FinalBurn
The demo video (please see THIS
Gran Turismo (shown in both orientations on the iPhone)
Assault Rigs
Again: check out the head-to-head iPhone 3G S vs. Dell Axim x51v video – click HERE!
Please see the following threads for more info / compatibility lists:
psx4iphone 1.1.0