The popular mobile Playstation emulator FpseCE is now available for Google Android. Appropriately, the developer has dropped the CE (which stood for Windows Compact Edition) from the name, and you can now download FPse from the Android Market for just under $5.

Sony is actually expected to launch its own PlayStation app for Android soon, making classic PlayStation One games available for purchase. The advantage of using a third party emulator such as FPse or psx4droid is that you can rip your own CDs to play most PSOne game (or download games off the internet… for titles you already legally own, of course).

FPse for Android also supports Android 2.2 and up, while the Sony app will require Google Android 2.3.

Some early users are reporting bugs in the FPse forum, but developer seems to be actively working to improve performance.

via reddit

Sure, Sony is getting ready to launch the Playstation Suite for Android, allowing you to purchase and run classic Playstation games on Android devices. But the Suite is only expected to work with Android 2.3 and up… and what are the odds it’s going to work with your existing PSOne ROM collection? Fortunately, Sony isn’t the only game in town.

There’s already a popular PSOne emulator for Android called psx4droid. Now it looks like we could soon see a second emulator in the Android Market. Mobile developer Schtruck plans to port FPSeCE, a popular Windows Mobile Playstation emulator to run on Android.

FPSeCE has been around for years, and I remember using it to play Final Fantasy VII on my Dell Axim x50v more than 4 years ago. Sure, it was a little sluggish on the PDA’s 624 MHz processor. But for RPGs and other games where speed isn’t necessarily of the essence, it worked amazingly well.

I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how the emulator handles modern Android devices with 1 GHz or faster processors.

Bear in mind, emulators like FPSe can be a bit tricky to use. First, you need a valid BIOS file from an original Playstation device. Second the emulators exist in a legal gray area at best, since it’s usually easier to just download games from the dark corners of the internet — even though it’s technically possible (if not easy) to rip CDs from your own game collection (which is what I did with FFVII, and man did it take a long time).

Schtruck says FPSe should hit the Android Market soon. To tide you over, he’s posted a few videos of the app in action, which you can check out after the break. It looks like the app lets you choose several different input methods including on-screen controls. There’s support for saving game states, skipping frames to improve performance, and you can play in both portrait and landscape modes.

via PocketNow

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The folks behind the FPSECE playstation emulator have been building software that lets you play classic Playstation games on Windows Mobile devices for a couple of years. I remember playing Final Fantasy VII on my Dell Axim X50v and it looked beautiful. The only problem is that the frame rate was just a little too slow for the game to be considered truly playable.

Flash forward a few years and FPSECE has made some serious progress — and so have mobile phones. FPSECE 0.10.1 is now available to supporters who donate a few bucks to the cause (The latest free version is FPSECE 0.10), and XDA-Developer forum member Audio Oblivion has posted a video of the new emulator running on a shiny new HTC HD2 Windows mobile phone.

He says he was getting frame rates of 40 to 50fps on most games, and the on-screen controls look like they work really well for most, if not all games.

In order to run most PlayStation games with FPSECE, you’ll need to track down an SCPH1001.bin file and have a compatible Windows Mobile phone. You can find out more by checking out the user manual. And you can check out 10 glorious minutes of Playstation gameplay on the HD2 after the break.

via PocketNow

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