Extract Your Own PS2 & PS1 BIOS (No Console Required!)

[Music] hey everybody this is Russ from Retro Game core one of the most common questions I get on my channel are what are bios files and why do I need them and essentially bios are system files that are required for certain emulators to run properly and some of the most common bios files are for the PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2. Now bios files are copyrighted and so what you're supposed to do is actually use an old console and then use special software to extract those files from the console itself but as you can imagine that does take quite a bit of work well in this video I'm going to show you a new technique that just came out that allows you to extract bios files for the PlayStation and Playstation 2 and the crazy thing is is that you can extract them directly from a PS3 firmware file that's freely available on Sony's website and so what that means is we now have a way to easily and legally extract bios files without having to use the console itself instead all you really need is a win Windows PC in about 5 or 10 minutes of your time and so let's go ahead and get started doing that here in this video [Music] okay to start I want to give credit where credit is due I first heard about this trick from this YouTube channel here called easy on the eyes and so really my purpose in making a video here is to give the method more exposure and I'm also going to leave a link to this YouTube channel in the video description below if you want to check it out they have a lot of neat emulation tutorials available here okay and as we get started here just a couple disclaimers first when you extract these bios files you'll be able to use them in any emulator and so for PlayStation 2 you'll be able to use it on the PC emulator of pcsx2 and then also on Android with Aether sx2 as well when it comes to PlayStation 1 you'll be able to use those bios files with retroarc as well as the Standalone dockstation emulator and then finally the method that we're going to use to do this is through a batch tool that actually is going to work within the existing PS3 emulator and so overall we're going to use three different tools to get started the first one is here available on archive.org called PS bios claim tool this is going to be the batch file that works with the PS3 emulator after that you've probably guessed it but we need the PS3 emulator called RP CS3 so we'll download this one too and then finally we're gonna need the PS3 system software that's available on playstation.com and I'll have a written guide in the video description as well which will include all of these download links to start let's go back to that archive.org website and then click on the zip file right here to download after that we'll go to the rpcs3 website we'll go to the download tab and then scroll down until you find the windows section from there we're going to download the most recent build and finally we'll go to the Sony website here we're going to right click on this download PS3 update option and then we're going to save this file you may get an error here with Google Chrome just go ahead and keep the file here and those are all the tools that we're going to need to get started so let's move on to the process next we're going to start with that batch tool that we got from archive.org now this is a ZIP file so you'll need to extract these files and you could use the built-in Windows tool like I'm doing here or you could use 7-Zip or WinRAR as well either way once you extract the files you should find these three right here and so let's go ahead and move these files to the side and get the other tools ready to go up next we need to unzip the PS3 emulator this is a 7-Zip file so I would recommend using 7-Zip to do the extraction but after that within the folder you'll find the RP CS3 exe file go ahead and open that up and you'll get this welcome screen right here just go ahead and click on these two boxes and then select continue and so this here is the RP CS3 user interface and next we need to install the PS3 firmware that we downloaded so we'll go up to file and then install firmware and then navigate to wherever you save that file and then open it up it'll take a minute to run through the installation and it'll say that it's good to go and then after that it's going to compile all the PPU modules and this only needs to be done one time and after that you're good to go from there we can actually close out of our pcs3 we don't need that again and so next we're going to use the batch file to extract the BIOS and all we have to do right here is take these two firmware files and then drag them into the RP CS3 folder and all you have to do here is just click on this batch file and depending on what version of Windows you're using and your security settings you make it an error like this if this happens just click on more info and then select run anyway and it'll take a few minutes to run through the tool but when it's done it'll say that it is extracted the BIOS files and press any key to continue and believe it or not we're actually done if we look back in that RP CS3 folder we now have two different bios files right here and they are labeled as PS3 PS1 bios and then PS3 PS2 mu bios so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to move these over to my desktop and then we're going to test them out to make sure they work so here I am in the desktop PS2 emulator called pcsx2 and as you can imagine I've already installed the emulator and then I've also added in all of my PS2 ROMs but I don't have any bios files loaded for example if I try to open up a game it's going to give me an error and says it requires bios and so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go into settings and then select bios and then near the top you'll have a browse option what you want to do is click on that and then go to the desktop wherever you have the BIOS file saved and then select that folder from there it should now show you the PS1 and PS2 bios because we're using the PS2 emulator I'm going to select the PS2 bios here now one other note here is that these bios will only work in fastboot mode and so make sure that that is clicked here in the settings and what this essentially means is that it's going to bypass the PS2 boot up logo when you first start it up either way we're now good to go so we're going to close out of the settings here and then we're going to start up that same game and as you can see right here it booted right off so yeah these PS2 bios are working just great let's go ahead and close out of that game and start up another one here's Burnout Revenge and yeah double clicking on it here and it starts right up so I think we're good to go when it comes to PS2 let's move over to PS1 and do the same test and so here I am with the Standalone duckstation emulator same thing here I've installed it and also loaded up my ROMs and the interface here is very similar so we're going to go into settings and then bios and then in the middle of the screen here there's the browse option so let's navigate to the desktop where my BIOS files are and then up top here it says Auto detect but we can actually select the PS1 bios to make it easier and so in each of the drop downs you should now see the PS1 bios and so let's select that here and I'm going to do this for all three regions even though I'm only using American ROMs right now also make sure that you select the fastboot method right here because if you don't the games won't actually boot anyway once we're done let's close out of the settings here and then we'll start up a game let's try Breath of Fire 4. and as you can see here the PlayStation logo booted up indicating that we're using official bios and just like that the game also booted up as well so there we are we have now extracted PS2 and PS1 bios files without having to have the original consoles on hand in the first place now say you have a bunch of PS1 and PS2 game discs around and you want to make sure that you extract those ROM files as well well luckily if you have a Windows PC and a DVD disk drive it's actually very easy to do to get started all you have to do is install image burn which is a free tool available on Windows and then you'll use the read function within the tool this is going to read the disk and make an ISO file from there you can go to my file compression guide that I made a couple weeks ago which will actually show you how to compress an ISO file down to a CHD file this means it's going to play on all the major emulators but with a much smaller file size and really that's about it for this video I was really excited when I heard this news and so I wanted to give it more exposure because honestly up until now there hasn't been a very easy way to get PS2 and PS1 bios at least legally and so I think it is pretty cool that we can do all this directly from a Windows PC and so be sure to check out the written guide that I have Linked In the video description to be able to grab all these files and I hope you enjoyed this video as always thank you for watching and be sure to like And subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy gaming [Music]

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 127,939

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Id: j6LQhX9Vjyg

Length: 7min 54sec (474 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 17 2023