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Emulating SNES and other gaming consoles are a commonplace when we talk about PC gaming. But what not anyone knows is that it's possible to emulate some gaming machines on another gaming machines. As well as some emulators for the Sega Dreamcast and Microsoft Xbox, there are emulators for Sony Playstation 2.
You may think: the newer generation of consoles has even online distribution through Virtual Console and similar services). Why he's talking about Playstation 2? Well, I'm talking about SNES also, and it's even older. The fact is: Playstation 2 is still a very popular platform. If we consider countries like Brazil, he's yet more popular (although its sales in Japan are still respectable).
SNES Station does the magic
The piece of software that's responsible for turning your Playstation 2 into an old Super Nintendo is SNES Station. It's based on the SNES9X emulator source code, ported to the PS2. It's pretty good, but it's not updated for a long time and not all games play perfectly. So don't be disapointed if your favorite games do not play as you expect.
All you need to do is burn a CD containing the SNES Station binary, the config file and the ROM files. It's not required to be a DVD, as most people think; use a DVD only if you have more games than I do and they don't fit on 700MB.
Requisites
You need:
The ROM files
A blank CD-R
A modded PS2, capable of booting from a CD-R burnt by yourself. If you can run backup games on it, it may be OK.
How to do it
Uncompress the zip file you downloaded. Pick two files:
- SNES_EMU.ELF (the executable)
- SYSTEM.CNF (the config file)
The SNES_EMU.ELF file is the binary, the file which actually will run. The SYSTEM.CNF file is used by Playstation 2 to know what to run. Of course, its content will point to SNES_EMU.ELF. It's only informatie, you will not need to edit any file.
On you CD burner software of choice, start a data CD project. Note that you have to burn the CD the "traditional" way. Using some fancy methods such as UDF method embedded in Windows Explorer will create a CD with wrong format.
- Put into the root folder of the project the SNES_EMU.ELF and SYSTEM.CNF files.
- Create a subfolter on the project called "ROMS"
- Put your ROM files into this folder. You can create subfolders to help finding the games later.
- Setup the burning options. DO NOT burn in multisession mode. Use the least recording speed you can choose and never do the actual recording on a laptop powered only by batteries.
- As a last check, if your program ask you the Datatrack mode or something similar (as k3b does) select "Mode2".
How to use it
At this point you may be recorded your media and booted it into you console. The emulator interface is very simple to use:
- Browse ROM lists by using D-Pad or the left analog stick.
- X makes you enter folders or select a game
- Selecting the ".." file on the top of a list goes to the parent folder
Inside any game, you can use L1+R1 to make a menu appear. On this menu you can load and save game states, adjust screen and go back to list. The other buttons on your joystick map exactly to the corresponding buttons on SNES (triangle becomes X, square becomes Y, and so on) and the L and R shoulders are L2 and R2.
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