I have a saved game from Gamefaqs, can I play a game using other people's saved games. I know how to do it on SNES9x for the SNES, just wondered if it's possible on PCSXR.

Game saves may be in emulator-specific formats; not sure how standardized card and freeze formats are for PSX. Speaking of, what's the standard for PSX emulation on Mac right now? Macscene's database has nothing, OpenEmu has no PSX core, and most old emulation sites list ye olde PCSX/PCSXR/ZeroPSX which were aging and flaking out even back on Lion.

After seeing RedAsh on kickstarter, I got a hankering to revisit MegaMan Legends, and since my discs are in another state, that meant emulation. It looks like someone has banged together a PCSXR build that runs on 10.9+. Link is in the description of the youtube video (direct link www.mediafire.com/download/t06iw2yri9d02...%2810.9-under%29.zip ); after a few hiccoughs and sputters and installing the complete PSX BIOS pack from www.emuparadise.me/biosfiles/bios.html , early results are promising.
(Note you'll need .iso files, .img files, or discs. BIN/CUE does not seem to be supported.)

"It can run Panther"
"It runs all the Macs. Any version of the OS"
Hahaha, it's an Intel application. Normally I wouldn't point this out, but he said it works on Panther (10.3, PPC only).

Freeze-files (save-states) are almost always emulator specific. You can't move them between different emulators.

Game save data (memory cards, battery backed saves) is almost always universal. You can move them between different emulators, provided you put the save data where the emulator wants it and rename the file to what the emulator expects.

Thanks guys. As I was playing PCSXR, noticed it had a cheats option in the menu under FILE, it's not your regular NES enter the game genie code easy task, looks like ya gotta load a cht file, is that correct?

I'm not familiar with the cheat functionality in PCSXR, but I assume it's similar to the PCSX2 cheat format. On PCSX2 you download a CHT file and edit it to turn on/off the codes you want. Or make your own CHT file by figuring out where values are stored in RAM.

Fun facts on cheating: the Game Genie (and I think the Pro Action Replay) worked by overriding values in ROM. For example, in the code that says "subtract 1 from your lives", it would replace the 1 with 0. Therefore, when you died, it would take 0 lives away from you (making it infinite lives)

Other devices, like the GameShark, worked by altering values in RAM. For example, you have 5 lives. If it suddenly becomes 4 lives, the GameShark will change it right back to 5.

Do note that I oversimplified things.

I have no concept of what a cheat even entails in PSX and beyond. In ye olde cartridge days, Game Genie et al basically specified an address and a replacement data byte. Whenever the system requested that raw address in memory, the replacement byte would be returned instead of the byte from ROM. This was convenient because games were laid out in a monolithic flat address space. As of PS1 and later disc-based systems, game media contain proper filesystems and encoded asset packs and such. Thus, some greater amount of information is likely required to tell the cheat device what to fake and how. Since the emulator was written to be useful, I'd imagine it doesn't have its own specialized unique notion of what a "cheat" is, and any cheat files are likely ProActionReplay data. However, I wouldn't rule out the option of cheats being some form of hacked freeze/save state, in which case the previously discussed freeze/save rules apply for formatting and how to get them in and out of the emulator.

seanstar wrote:


OpenEmu Experimental has a PSX core; I've been using it for the past 3 years without issues. You have to provide a cusesheet for each disk image, and an m3u file for multicd games. It gets its PSX emulation from mednafen, just like Bizhawk (which is a good OpenEmu alternative for tweakers and cheaters).

Speaking of which, BizHawk handles a lot of cheat formats, so might be useful for this discussion.

As for a dedicated core emulator, PCSXR is the only one still standing I think.

Yea, I've recently entered the world of PSX on OpenEmu. Thing is, most Sega CD files have cues in them, & others have cues in them, but for some crazy reason, PSX zipped files on every iso bank around the WWW does not have a cue sheet attached to the iso. So I'm currently using PCSXR, until I figure cue sheets out.

redump.org/discs/system/psx/ -- gives you a cuesheet for each published PSX CD. However, for the most part, all PSX games are the same:



The only exceptions are PSX files that also contain red book audio tracks that play alongside the game. These need a more complex cuefile to let the emulator know where to find the tracks and how they're encoded.

Of course, you'll also need an .m3u file for multi-cd discs; to use that, you first add the cue files to OpenEmu, and then drag the m3u file listing the order of the disks into OpenEmu too; if it finds the referenced cue files, it'll remove them from the GUI and replace with one file based on the m3u. Then you can switch between CDs in the interface using the floating control bar.

THAT sounds most useful. Just got a new 13" MBP work laptop since my old 2007 15" is in no way up to the task of doing my job from the road, and my my 2011 27" iMac is in no way up to the task of doing my job from the road, and since it's not a primary machine, I'm experimenting with how much of my old gear I can jettison. Going to try pure OpenEmu for a bit and see how it goes, but I may end up with a few more questions before all is through...