PlayStation 1 games on your hacked PlayStation Portable

The PlayStation Portable is one of the best handheld consoles to own, even now in 2024. It’s incredibly easy to hack which lets you play any PSP game from a backup file on it’s SD card.

But once you’ve hacked it you also unlock one of its other hidden features.

The PlayStation Portable is also able to play PlayStation 1 games.

The system has a built in emulator which simply needs you to package up the PlayStation 1 game as what’s know as an Eboot package, copy it over to your SD card, and then you can play everything from the massive PlayStation library of games.

So let me show you how to do it.

Requirements

First off you’ll need a hacked PSP. If you haven’t done this yet please have a look at my 10 minute hacking video.

If you haven’t got a PSP yet you can pick them up on eBay or elsewhere for around £40 to £60. The original 1000 series models are great, but the 2000 and 3000 models have a better screen and double the RAM.

And don’t forget to buy a big enough SD card. These games can be over 1GB each, and you’re going to want to put a lot of games onto your system. I’d advise a 64GB card at least, so you’ll need to get a Memory Stick Duo adapter to be able to use the standard micro SD cards. The original Sony memory sticks are just too small.

So with all that sorted out we just need to download one bit of software.

PSX2PSP

PSX2PSP takes PlayStation game backup files and combines them into a single EBOOT.PBP file that the PSP is able to play. The backup files can be in either bin/cue format or as iso images, and the software will also cope with multiple disc games.

You simply need to download the application zip file and extract the contents to wherever you want to keep the software. It doesn’t get installed as such so we just run the .exe file from the folder where you save it.

If you run the psx2psp.exe you’ll first have to choose which mode to use. I personally prefer classic mode as it gives you easier access to all the program options, even if it doesn’t look quite as pretty.

So now all we need are some game backups.

Game Backup Files

As usual I’m going to leave it to you to sort out your game files. There are easy ways to back up your original disks using a package called ImgBurn, or of course you can find them online. Do make sure however that you check out my copyright video to make sure you’re able to download the titles you want legally in your region.

As I mentioned earlier the file can be in either bin/cue format or as iso images, and the software will also cope with multiple disc games.

So next we need to create the game package.

Creating the Game Package

In PSX2PSP we first need to specify where we want to save our built game package. Click on the Output PBP folder ellipsis button and select an output folder. The software will package up out game into its own folder which will be saved where we specify here. This folder is what we’ll eventually copy over to the PSP.

Next we need to tell the app where all the bin or iso files are.

In the ISO/PBP file dropdown select the File 1 option. Then click the find file button at the end and finds the first bin or iso file. Once you select this you should see some game data popping into the information area. The important bit here is the Main Game ID which is unique to this game, but is also going to be the folder name when the game package is saved.

If there’s more than one iso or bin file just repeat this process by selecting File 2 in the ISO/PBP dropdown and then finding that bin/iso file and so on until you’ve got all the disks for the game covered.

We next need to find some images for the game that our PSP will use in the menu system.

The best place to get these is from the Launchbox Database website at

https://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/

Just search for the game title you want and it should pop up in the preview area.

The game may be available on a number of platforms so just select the PlayStation version.

You can now go to the images tab and you’ll see box art, screenshots and other images that we can use.

We need two images. One for the box art or icon and one for a background image. The icon image should be fairly square and the box art is perfect. The background image will end up as a landscape image but the PSP will crop it to fit. I tens to use screenshots. Just right click on an image and save it to your PlayStation game folder. I like to save my bin/cue files and images as a single named folder on my PC just to keep all the files together.

Now we go back into PSX2PSP and select our downloaded images as the Icon image and Background images. To check what they look like just click the preview button.

Lastly we need to go into the options menu. You can leave most of the settings as default but the one you can play with is the compression setting. I tend to leave mine at 9 to make the final game package as small as possible, but at this setting you might find some games that don’t work. It’s not many, but if you do get one just come back in and regenerate the game package at a lower, or no, compression setting.

So save that settings and we can now convert our game to an EBOOT package.

Once the app has done it’s work it will report back on the final compression ratio and we’re then ready to copy the game to the PSP.

Copying the Game to the PSP

So hook your PSP up to your PC over USB or simply take out the SD card and pop that directly into your card reader.

In the Output PBP folder from PSX2PSP you should find a package folder that matches the Main Game ID from the game information area.

This needs to be copied and pasted into the /PSP/GAME folder on the PSP sd card.

That’s the game installed.

Playing the Game

When you now boot up your PSP and go to the Game menu, Memory stick. You should see your PlayStation game sitting there. Just select it and you’re now playing PlayStation 1 games on your PSP.