Been fiddling around with the PlayStation Classic today and think I've got the whole "adding new stuff to it and customising things" pretty much sorted. I got an OTG adapter and a 128GB flash drive, and all seems to be working fine with those; 128GB is more than enough for most things I want to do with the system for now, since it is enough space to store complete(ish) libraries for most pre-PlayStation platforms, and plenty more room for PS1 games.
I've been sorting out disc images for a bunch of PS1 games this evening, including a variety of things that I always wanted to play back in the day but was never able to — primarily thanks to the fact that a lot of them didn't cross the pond from North America to Europe. Given how pricey some of these games are — and the fact that you're always rolling the dice a bit with preowned CD-based games — this seems like the best means of enjoying these games right now.
I've been impressed with how easy Project Eris, RetroArch and EmulationStation have been to use once the initial setup was done with. I had an initial hiccup with Project Eris being unable to add new PlayStation games — format your flash drive in exFAT format, not NTFS as the documentation says, to fix this — but now all seems to be working perfectly smoothly.
One thing I do want to experiment with is whether or not home computer emulation will also work on this thing. There's no reason why it shouldn't, but hooking up a USB keyboard would be a bit of a faff. I need to investigate whether it's possible to map controller buttons to keyboard inputs on home computer platforms — I'm sure it's possible to, but I just haven't tried it yet. Once I figure that out, there'll be some 8- and 16-bit micro goodness going on that flash drive, too, I'm sure.
The cool thing about this is that I'm effectively making an enormously portable little gizmo that is absolutely rammed to the rafters with every retro game you could think of. I've argued against this when talking about the Evercade and I do still believe curated collections are a much better means of celebrating retro games, but having one device with a huge library available at the touch of a button is certainly convenient, I won't lie. I'm picturing it being particularly useful if we're ever allowed to go and visit friends again; with just one device, we'll all be able to play a whole bunch of games that we used to love on a variety of platforms, without having to switch lots of cables around. That will be super-fun.
That and I'll be able to play all my dream RPGs in bed. Looking forward to that. Question now is: where to begin…?
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