Pulling a game from the shelf… placing it
in the console… hitting power… and settling down for an evening of gaming. That feeling is simply irreplaceable. But the cold hard reality is that playing
classic games this way is no longer practical for a lot of people, and especially due to
the nature of disc-based media and mechanical drives, it will continue to become increasingly
difficult for everyone as the years wane on. In this episode we’re taking a look at one
solution to these problems for the original PlayStation: the PSIO. [ MUSIC: Matt McCheskey ] In previous episodes, we’ve looked at various
flash media devices for cartridge-based systems such as the EverDrive line and a few other
alternatives - the appeal being that they can play ROM dumps, fan hacks, and homebrew
on their native hardware instead of through software emulation. In the world of disc-based media, we’ve
also looked at the Rhea and Phoebe for Sega Saturn, the Super SD System 3 for PC Engine,
and more recently we’ve also been messing around with the GDEMU for Dreamcast. Needless to say, all of this lies in a bit
of a gray area - legally the hardware is permissible, and using your personal game backups is considered
basically legal, while the act of sharing ROM files or disc rips is not. But on the flipside, it’s generally held
in the community that this is also the only feasible method for keeping classic games
accessible to the average person when the companies themselves fail to do so - to ensure
that they are remembered and remain in the public consciousness, and to preserve their
history for documentation and research. Plenty of good comes from these methods, and
everyone draws their own line to decide where it becomes harmful… if at all. Personally I’ve been much more concerned
with getting flash solutions up and running for my disc-based consoles because well, we
probably can’t count on those games and systems to keep trucking along for as long
as our Super Nintendos. And without a doubt, one of the most popular
systems that uses optical disc media is the original Sony PlayStation. This is the PSIO by the Australia-based Cybdyn
Systems… or “Sigh-Oh,” as its creators call it. The PSIO does not replace the system’s physical
disc drive. Instead, it simply connects to a system’s
rear Parallel I/O port. Since this port ended up never being used
for any official commercial products from Sony (to our knowledge anyway), it was removed
from later PlayStation consoles… so, to use PSIO, you must own a system with a Parallel
port. Of course this would hardly be a My Life in
Gaming episode if we didn’t go out of our way to make the point that later PlayStation
consoles have very slightly sharper video output compared to models with the Parallel
ports. This includes some board revisions using the
larger system form factor, along with the smaller PS One consoles. Admittedly the difference is virtually invisible
and doesn’t show up very well here, so don’t dwell on it. More important is the fact that RGB video
output is supported on all PlayStation consoles, big or small, in all regions. The big catch with PSIO is that it’s not
exactly as “plug ‘n play” as it would appear at a glance. A tiny switch board is included with the package,
along with some wiring, and it must be installed internally to use the PSIO cartridge. Many people, including myself, have virtually
no soldering experience, this may limit the device’s appeal… but if you really want
it, don’t be afraid to ask around for help. I was able to get mine installed through a
local connection, who suggested to me that I should characterize it as an “intermediate”
project - not recommended for beginners. The other catch with PSIO is availability
- the device has been in the works for the better part of a decade and has been sold
in very limited quantities over the course of its development. We ordered this unit during a pre-order window
in April 2018 and did not receive it until December, which is actually a shorter wait
than many others endured during earlier periods. However, it’s looking like PSIO has finally
reached the point of maturity where it’s ready to become more readily obtainable, with
the US-based online retailer Stone Age Gamer and the Canadian RetroModding.com preparing
to be the first partners to offer PSIO outside of Cybdyn Systems. It’s still too early to say whether this
truly represents a radical turning point in PSIO availability and fulfillment time, but
for now we’ll just have to be hopeful. When purchasing a PSIO, be aware that second-hand
sales are kind of discouraged by Cybdyn Systems’ approach to keeping the firmware under lock
and key. To download the SD card files required to
run your PSIO cartridge, you must provide the email address associated with your order,
along with the PSIO serial number and order number from Cybdyn or one of their confirmed
retail partners. Even just extracting the firmware files from
the downloaded zip requires your serial number again as the password, so like it or not,
you’d be wise to keep all of these files and your purchase information safely stored. With all that out of the way, let’s get
ready to actually use the thing! First, choose a standard sized SDHC or SDXC
card… I went with a 128 gigabyte card by San Disk. In Windows, simply right-click your card to
format it… for cards up to 32 gigs, use FAT32, and for all larger cards, format as
ExFat with a recommended allocation size of 256 kilobytes. Alright, now we’re ready to start loading
it up with games! Or... so you might think. We’re trying to get you going just from
this video, but the PSIO Systems Manual is quite the hefty 40-page PDF and you will probably
need to reference it a bit. Even if it seems overwhelming, it’s actually
quite refreshing to have this sort of extensive consumer-focused official documentation for
a retro product. Assuming you’ve already downloaded and unzipped
the critical MENU.SYS file, copy it to the root of the formatted SD card. Now place the card in the PSIO, and after
some initialization… well, here we are! But without any games, there’s not much
to do. Naturally, the PSIO claims to be for playing
your personal library of PlayStation game backups that you own. But actually getting them onto your SD card
does take a bit of work, and certain games may require extra steps. On Windows, we like to use the free ImgBurn
software for creating game backups. Place the disc in your PC’s optical drive,
and then click “Create image file from disc.” Select your save directory, give your disc
a name, and you can leave the file type as the .BIN default. Click the big button at the bottom and wait
for the entire disc to be processed. This is going to take a good several minutes,
so if you plan to backup your games legit, this could be a multi-day project. The result will be not one, but two files:
a .BIN and a .CUE. If you were to acquire PlayStation disc images
through some means other than ripping it yourself, it’s very possible you’ll find them in
this exact same BIN/CUE pair. Place these in a folder named for their corresponding
game on the SD card, put it back in the PSIO, and give it a whirl. For many, if not most games, this method seems
to work just fine and you don’t necessarily have to do anything else. For those who haven’t had a good PlayStation
disc drive in a while, watching FMVs without skipping might seem like a revelation. But things start to get tricky when trying
to use games with Redbook audio… music streamed directly from the game disc. [Shyna: Let’s go!] Any game that uses Redbook audio, even if
only for one or two tracks in a game, will need to be converted to work correctly with
PSIO. If your game contains multiple BIN files,
then it’s definitely Redbook audio. If you drag the CUE file into Notepad, you
can confirm Redbook audio use by observing “AUDIO” written next to the extra tracks. So to convert, you’ll need to have downloaded
the PSIO Systems Console program. Choose “Batch Image Conversion” and select
the folder for that game. Separate folders will be created containing
the original files as-is, and another with a new single-BIN image along with a CU2 file
instead of a regular CUE. Place the single-BIN image and CU2 file on
your SD card, and your game and audio should work correctly. You can also perform this process on games
that do not use Redbook audio, but as far as we can tell, it is not necessary to do
so. In the PSIO options menu, you can choose an
audio compatibility mode… apparently K1V3 works with almost everything, but there may
be rare occasions where you need to choose another. Over its many years of development, game compatibility
on the PSIO has made major strides, and what we’ve seen so far suggests that games with
problems are indeed fairly few at this point. Although we did get lockups when trying to
retry a level in the free mode in Driver, and Jackie Chan Stuntmaster never loaded past
the legal text.We also never got audio working correctly with Bust-A-Move 4 no matter what
we tried (maybe it’s just us), but otherwise we encountered no issues that we couldn’t
solve. [Glitched Audio] Back in the late 90s, nothing said you were
in for one heck of an adventure more than a double-wide multi-disc PlayStation jewel
case. To compile these games for the PSIO, the easiest
thing to do is to place all of your BINs and CUEs for that game into a single folder. Then execute the Batch Image Conversion with
the PSIO Systems Console program. This will create the CU2 files for each disc
as well as a single MULTIDISC.LST file. Include all of these files in a single directory
for that game on your SD card. After selecting the game in the PSIO menu,
hit the circle button once for Details, and a second time to view the game’s discs and
make your selection. When prompted for a disc swap during gameplay,
simply pop the SD card from your PSIO (careful to not dislodge the PSIO) and re-insert to
cycle to the next disc. Each game on your SD card must be represented
by a folder in the root directory which contains all of its associated files. You cannot place folders within folders, thus
you cannot further organize by alphabet groups, regions, genres, etc. Playing Japanese imports on an American system
is no problem at all with the PSIO. The PSIO also includes the ability to switch
the system between NTSC and PAL modes as well as load PAL software on an NTSC system and
vice-versa… but this is not possible with the earliest PlayStation systems, which fail
to switch video modes. This RCA jack unit is quite early, so sadly
we were not able to test any PAL games. Of course, a major appeal to flash carts is
the ability to run homebrew software and patches like fan translations on real hardware. Now, maybe we’re just digging in the wrong
places, but this kind of content seems to be a relatively sparse in the PlayStation
scene. Nonetheless, there are a few heavy hitting
English language fan translations, such as Policenauts and Tales of Phantasia. Hey, fun fact: the PlayStation has a game
from the Fire Emblem series creator that’s pretty much exactly Fire Emblem in everything
but name, and there’s a fan translation. Of course one perk to playing off an SD card
instead of a spinning disc is the potential of reduced load times. And indeed, the PSIO is unquestionably faster. Note that we are comparing two different PlayStation
systems here because the disc drive in our PSIO unit is not so good while our late-90s
system seems to work perfectly. So what do you think, is this difference worth
it? I tend to think of myself as a pretty patient
person and I have never been particularly bothered by load times in general, so I’m
not especially blown away by saving 2 seconds or so on a longer load, or 1 second on a pre-rendered
background transition. But over time I suppose it could add up and
it might be a big deal to you. But if you were hoping the PSIO could bring
the notoriously sluggish PS1 versions of Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI more in line
with the Super Nintendo originals, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. But how about this? Let’s try running our good CD unit (on the
left here) versus the PSIO simultaneously and see which gets us to actually playing
a game faster. Sorry for just using composite video cables
here, it was just quicker to set things up for this particular scenario. We’re using the PSIO’s fast boot function
that bypasses the Sony Computer Entertainment logo and we’ve turned off any sort of logo
splash upon game selection. We’re gonna choose Spyro: Year of the Dragon,
that’s pretty far down our list so I’m just gonna use the search function here…
and there it is. But seriously, those PlayStation composite
cables, they shipped with like, PS1, PS2, and PS3, and those cables just keep filling
up my IKEA baskets. OK so for running the game off the disc, it
took 48 seconds until PRESS START appeared on the title screen. We’re starting a new game and we’re gonna
keep hitting Select to skip a series of cutscenes. I actually haven’t yet played through Spyro
2 or 3 yet, but I really liked the first one, I finally got around to playing it in 2017. OK, so the PSIO actually took 20 seconds longer
until PRESS START appeared, but I think it’s got a chance to catch up between all of these
loading screens that the CD unit has been chewing through. Of course, normally I would watch these cutscenes,
but that’s not really the point here. You know, I don’t even know if the remasters
were all that necessary, these games still look pretty great to me. OK I think we’re about to start playing
on the left monitor here… and… there’s Spyro! Total time from power on to gameplay: 1 minute,
35 seconds. Well it’s still faster than modern games,
load times have only gotten worse. Alright, and the PSIO reaches the finish line
let’s say 10 to 12 seconds slower factoring in a cushion for input clumsiness on my part. Of course, there exist other mods to let you
play burned CD-R copies and plenty of ways to load up PS1 backups from flash media on
other devices. From PC emulation to custom firmware on other
Sony consoles like the PS3 and PlayStation Vita, these options are well worth exploring,
but the PSIO is clearly meant for people who specifically want to play backups on the original
hardware. You might could argue that in its current
state, the PSIO doesn’t really let you do anything new… faster in-game loads aside,
it just plays PlayStation games on a PlayStation and you could already do that on any PlayStation
system with a good disc drive… so we can’t help but imagine our own PSIO feature wishlist. How about backing up saves to the SD card? Or options to alter dither pattern behavior
to suit each user’s visual preference? Perhaps the biggest megaton feature of all
would be an option to force 240p resolution at all times to make it possible to play games
like Chrono Cross and Silent Hill, with their mix of 240p gameplay and 480i menus, without
the sync drops that you typically get with resolution changes when playing through a
digital upscaler instead of on a CRT. But hey, we have no idea what sorts of features
are even technically feasible via the PlayStation’s parallel port, or with the PSIO’s own hardware. But we do hope that PSIO firmware development
continues and that the device can be supported by Cybdyn for a long time to come, and that
one day it could far surpass its current state - which is doing the basics very well, but
we can dream for more, right? Idiosyncrasies in properly setting up your
games and hopes for the future aside, the PSIO is certainly a marvel - an attractive
polished product with an excellent presentation. A device unlike any other that anyone else
has yet taken the investment of time, effort, and money to engineer for one of the most
successful video game systems in history. And in time, we may see the PSIO become the
key to keeping our original PlayStations running for decades to come.
