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
