PlayStation Classic uses open source emulator

The twenty games of the Sony PlayStation Classic run on the PCSX Reloaded emulator for ARM systems. This is open source software that emulates the PlayStation 1, which has been in development since 2010.

A list of licenses can be found in the PlayStation Classic’s menu, including one for using the PCSX ReARMed emulator, Kotaku noticed when reviewing the compact retro game console. PCSX ReARMed is a fork of the PCSX Reloaded emulator, which in turn is a continuation of the PCSX software, which first appeared in 2000.

It is not known whether, and if so what changes Sony has made to the emulator. Sony probably chose the emulator because of its convenience. The PlayStation Portable already got an emulator for the PlayStation 1; it was developed by Sony itself, but the PSP had a MIPS R4000 processor instead of an ARM soc. That emulator also brought with it the necessary complexity, wrote Eurogamer in 2007. The software dynamically adjusted the clock speed of the MIPS cpu, among other things, and let the chip run at 333MHz for complex tasks, while the standard clock speed was 222MHz.

Frank Cifaldi from GameHistory.org points out that Sony tried to pull a PlayStation emulator off the market nineteen years ago. Legally that didn’t work, but this goal was still achieved by buying the emulator. “Now they happily use an open source emulator for their own products. We’ve come a long way!”