Playstation Emulator Review and How To: the ePSXe Emulator

The ePSXe Playstation emulator is one of the best emulators for the PSX.

The last update to the emulator was made on the 17th May 2008, and the current version is v1.7.0. Although it doesn't seem to have had an update recently the ePSXe discussion forums have updates every day, so the community is still alive and well. You should be able to find help there and this forum will be a very useful resource if you have trouble making a game run.

This article will Review this free PSX emulator and then describe how to download, install, configure and run it on your PC.

Further resources will be included in the links section at the end (and links scattered throughout the body of the article).

NOTE: it is illegal to download BIOS or ROM images.

The success of an emulator depends on how many games are compatible with it and will run on it. Some emulators provide a 'Compatability List' of games that work with the emulator. Unfortunately this seems to be absent from the Official epsxe PSX emulator website.

However, if you are willing to dig a little further use the compatibility list of epsxe emulator games forum instead. If you know what game you are looking to find use the forum search tool and look for the 'epsxe-compatibility' string in the url for the search results.

There are a considerable amount of games that seem to work with this emulator - and you can find people to help you on the forum if you get stuck. This is always useful when tinkering with emulators of any type.

The ePSXe emulator zip file downloaded from the official ePSXe website does not include everything you need to get the emulator running.

This PSX emulator uses a plugin system to allow plugin writers to support as much PC hardware as possible. It makes it a little trickier for the end user to setup - but also makes writing the emulator system a simpler task and therefore makes the software as a whole more robust and bug free. This is a good thing.

The file 'zlib1.dll' is missing and you must download this and the graphics plugins separately. The How-To on the next page tells you what you need and how to go about getting these files.

The Playstation BIOS needs to be dumped from your PlayStation before you can use the emulator. Copyright law allows you to use your own PlayStation and games for use within an emulator.