The History of PSX Emulators - Part 1

PSEmu (1997)

PSEmu Pro

PSEmu, or Playstation Emulator, was the first Playstation emulator to be developed. The project was started by Marcin Dudar, known only as Duddie, in March 1997. Duddie developed the emulator under the alias Vision Thing Group Software, a company (apparently) that he founded in 1994. Tratax, who took care of dynamic recompilation, and Kazzuya, who took care of plug-ins and 3D coprocessor, were hired the following year, the three becoming the heads of the project. The first release of the emulator was in June 1997 for MS-DOS, in the emulator's alpha phase. At first it was just a prototype, and could not run games. In June it was already emulating the BIOS and the GPU, and in August the CD-ROM. I believe that at this time it began to run commercial games for the console. The project worked with dynamic recompilation, known as Dynarec. It is a conversion of the hardware code into the native language of the CPU that executes it, in this case the PC.

PSEmu Pro (Breath of Fire)

This makes the creation process faster, instead of emulating all these codes. PSEmu was one of the first emulation projects to work on this system, which would become standard a few years later. In PSEmu, recompilation is used only for the PSX CPU. In October 1997, it changed its name to PSEmu Pro, as it became known worldwide. In the same month, Marcin also mentioned in an interview with the Archaic Ruins website that he had the idea of ​​developing a version of the emulator for Windows NT, a PC system focused on network development, and that it would be called PSEmuNT, but the project never came to fruition.

PSEmu Pro (Dialog Records)

In January 1998, the last version for MS-DOS was released. In March 1998, it was announced that the MS-DOS version would be discontinued and a Windows version would be released in its place, with greater CPU speed, game compatibility, and support for Direct3D and DirectX. This version was released in August 1998 as the first beta version of the emulator. The emulator had its pioneering features. It was the first to use the plug-in system, which innovated the concept in the field, and was later applied to other console emulators, such as the Nintendo 64, Playstation 2, and even the NES. It was also, apparently, the first to emulate games from a console with CD-ROM support.

PSEmu Pro (About)

In the case of plug-ins, the idea arose due to the impossibility of recompiling the entire emulator to adapt to each new graphics card that appears on the market for PCs. Therefore, the plug-ins emulated the PSX GPU and connected to the PC graphics card through the corresponding API (DirectX, among others). Henk-Jan Ober, Tratax, and Davide Pasca, Kazzuy, also became known for creating plug-ins for the emulator, such as the video plug-ins, Tratax's GPUGlide and Kazzuya's gpuKazSoft. Others also created plug-ins for the emulator, such as Duddie with its GPU, FoxFire and Zen with their OpenGL, Lewpy with its 3DFX and Glide, Nik with its 3D, and Pete Bernert with his D3D, OpenGL and DX6 D3D.

PSEmu Pro (Cheats/Memory Card/Settings/GamePad)

Other people joined the project, such as Rasky and Moonshado, from November 1998 onwards. At the beginning, it could run on a 486 PC, with a Super VGA video card and 4MB of memory. By the end, they were recommending a Pentium 300MhZ or k6-2 350MhZ, with 32MB of memory and a 3D video card. Over time, several members left the team, including Tratax, who left in early February 1999. The last version of the emulator was released in March 1999, when it was discontinued. After its end, Duddie dedicated himself alongside Tratax to the Impact emulator, which emulated arcade games based on the PSX. This project later resulted in the Emuhype team, which developed emulators for other arcade boards.

Pex (1998)

Pex

The Pex emulator was created in 1997 by Geoffrey Wossum, known as Maxon. Its first and only release was in February 1998, with MS-DOS and open source versions to be used in future projects. Although it never ran any games, it was one of the pioneers in trying to emulate the Sony Playstation.

Psyke (1998)

Psyke

Psyke was an emulator developed by Fab4, composed of Italians Giovanni Bajo and Stefano Crosara, known as Rasky and Moonshado. The project began in February 1998, with its first release in June of the same year with a version for Windows and running with support for DirectX 5. Its release already included support for CD-ROM games, despite having several game compatibility issues. Although they were already part of a PSX emulation project, they developed their emulator from scratch based on Visual C++ and Nasm. The CD-ROM support was authored by Peter Barrett. Before the creation of the project, Rasky had worked on the SPC700 sound core for a SNES emulator of which he was part, but with the appearance of ZSNES, the project was closed.

Psyke (About/Menus/Loading)

Duddie's work with PSEmu Pro, such as its dynamic recompilation, caught the attention of Rasky, who was inspired by Psyke's creation. In July 1998, they released the CdTest application, which served to test whether their PC would run CD-ROM games in the next version, 0.15, which would be released in August. In September 1998, CdTest 2.0 was released to guide users to the version that would be released, and also served as feedback on the project's development. This promised version, 0.20, was not released and the project went on hiatus in October 1998. Also in October 1998, the emulator received an article in Playstation Magazine, which was very optimistic about the project. In November 1998, Rasky and Moon joined the PSX emulation project, PSEmu Pro, of which Rasky was a big fan. The following year, the Psyke team finally released the long-awaited version 0.20, in March 1999.

Psyke (Setting)

Despite being released on that date, it was created in September 1998, which is the official end date of the project. This version improves CPU speed by 30% and can run all frames of 2D games, such as Metal Slug, on its Pentium 166Mhz with 3DFX. This is thanks to its rewrite of the PSX coprocessor, the GTE. It also has improvements in CD emulation, both with SCSI and IDE communication, and in systems such as Windows 95, 98 and NT, thanks to improvements by Peter Barrett, and implements the execution of .XA audio, which is the audio format found in PSX games. This last version was posted on the Emu24x website by the site's webmaster, DeeJ. The emulator had a short life, but despite this it had good development. It managed to emulate 90% of the CPU, 100% of the memory, 75% of the CD-ROM, 95% of the GPU, 85% of the GUI, 80% of 3DFX drivers and 90% of the software driver, among others. In addition, it also had a good graphics part, with Gourand shading, textures and bilinear filtering.

Virtual Yarouze (1998)

Virtual Yarouze

Virtual Yarouze, also known as Net Yaroze, or simply Yarouze (which means the expression: let's do this), was a project created in 1998 by Shawn McIntire, Xeon. The first and only version was released in June 1998, as an alpha version, released for Windows. The project had a whole plan. The alpha versions would be for audio and video development, and the release versions would be used to test the emulation of processors and joypads. There were plans for game emulation in the future. In addition, the emulator also planned ports for DOS, Amiga, Macintosh, Linux and other UNIX systems, and other Windows systems. The project had the help of many influencers in the scene, such as Sérgio Moreira, an expert in console programming, and the creators of PSX emulator projects, such as Jani Vaarala from PSMooSim, Duddie from PSEmuPro, Mario Rodriguez from Atlâant, Geofrey Wossum from pex, Nicolas Plourde from PSXEMU and Andrew Hogan from PSX '98. The emulator never got beyond just a prototype.

Several other emulator projects also started in 1998, such as Atlâant (started in 1997), PSmooSim, PSXEMU, Project Plasticity, PSX' 98, PSST! PlayStation Emulator, D-Lab, PLEMu Playstation Emulator, XMU, Psx2Pc, GMstation and PSMac (for MacOS). Some never got past the first alpha or demo version, and others were just future emulator projects that never came out. 1998 was undoubtedly the year of the boom in Playstation emulation worldwide.

Jackal (1999)

Jackal

Jackal was an emulator started in 1999 by George Moralis, Expert and Floating Point. Expert was the programmer of the emulator, and was the first Greek emulator programmer. His page was run within the emulation website, emualliance. The emulator was released around September 1999. Jackal emulated only the BIOS, the GPU, the DMA (direct memory access), the CPU core, and partial support, but not yet executable, of the CD-ROM functions.

Jackal (Interface)

It never ran any game, only the bios and demos. The emulator had help from some experts on the subject, such as Mario Rodrigez, author of the PSX emulator, Atlâant, among others. The project ended in October 1999 after the release of version 0.009 of the emulator. The emulator had 9 versions in total. In January 2000, it was announced that the project did not go ahead, because Expert had just joined the AdriPSX PSX project that year.