Last time I went over the learning experience that actually was modding the PAL PlayStation 3 console I wound up with. It wasn’t the worst process to do, but man is it not explained well; at least, not in any video or written work I found in a cursory search.
Regardless, I got things working — the system was running Custom Firmware (read, “modded” or “jailbroken,” whichever term you prefer) and was ready to run basically whatever game I wanted on it.
I tested some PlayStation games first, both US and Japanese games of varying types. Things ran well enough, which is what I expected – Sony’s inbuilt PlayStation emulation was always considered pretty good and while it did suffer some sync issues in Dance Dance Revolution titles (emulators can never get the hardware perfect, and those titles are very specifically programmed so imperfections in the emulator show in them) but nothing out of the ordinary in the long term. In a sense this was more of a “okay, is this working and is region lockout disabled” kind of test.
The real test came with PlayStation 2 games. Recall that this is a launch-era European unit, and those never had the Emotion Engtine hardware: they only ever had emulation of the PS2 CPU, but this unit does contain the “graphics synthesizer” GPU, so it’s classed as “Partial Hardware” compatibility — not the best, but not as bad as pure software, which is what all the later PS3 consoles have (and is why they only let you run digitally purchased games from a select library on the later consoles) so it still lets me run whatever I wish, with some games not running well.
This is where my concern was — Just how well would it run PlayStation 2 software? The answer is pretty well, with some issues.
Again, one of my heavy test specimens were PS2 DDR games — they are fun to play even with the controller, I enjoy the music in them (especially the Japanese releases) and they do test the system well. Some ran pretty well, with some synchronization issues with the notes and music, but some pretty much were unplayable. Still others ran, but had major timing issues – we’re talking several seconds, thus making them unplayable (the SuperNova series and X series Dance Dance Revolution games be they US or Japanese releases, being the ones to exhibit this oddity.)
A few other games showed odd graphic issues, but these were minor and were relegated to a few cases. Most titles, however, ran fine, meaning that while the Emotion Engine emulation in the PlayStation 3 model I had wasn’t perfect it was good enough for most things I’d want to do – far better than if the Graphics Synthesizer was emulated as well.
This leaves me with a system that I can, in effect, play pretty much whatever I’d want to on, from the PlayStation, PlayStation 2, or PlayStation 3 libraries. Of course, already having 2000 series PlayStation 3 makes using this one for PlayStation 3 games pointless (as I wouldn’t want to play legit games on my account using CFW anyway, regardless of how “safe” it otherwise is) this leaves the machine as a PS / PS2 dedicated system, mostly playing rips of games I own for the decreased load times. In fact, my copy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories refuses to load and is thus unplayable on my PS2, but ran fine when ripped to the PS3 and run from the hard drive.
That’s all I need it to be, honestly, is a PS/PS2 machine, and the fact that the system does HDMI output and upscales well makes it nice to use on both my “at my desk” TV (which is honestly crap but convenient) or on my main TV, which is far better but I’m rarely ever at. It’s a convenience thing which really opens up posibilities for me going forward, options I’d prefer not to take with an actual PlayStation or PlayStation 2 console — I don’t like connecting pre-HDMI systems to an HDTV unless I have to, after all.
In the final entry I’ll give some final thoughts and some oddities I noticed about this system, but to summarize, this all worked — everything I wanted to do with this system has been done, including a modest hard drive upgrade (more storage is always good) and so far with regular use it hasn’t failed on me yet, so I’m thinking, given how I’m using the system, it should last me for the foreseeable as a fun little way to enjoy the era of PlayStation gaming I always liked.
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