Ultimate PlayStation 3 setup – Play every PS3 PS2 PS1 & PSP Game

The very first production units of the PlayStation 3 were fully backwards compatible with PlayStation 2 game disks, I guess to make sure that the new console had access to a sizable game library and to encourage people to upgrade without losing access to their own disks. But as time went on that compatibility was dropped leaving the PS3 only able to play PS3 titles.

Luckily with a modded PS3 we’re not limited to what Sony wants to do. In fact we can even go further and play all the previous PlayStation model games. So PlayStation 2, PlayStation 1 and even PlayStation Portable games can all be played on either your custom firmware modded console or one running the PS3HEN exploit.

So in this video I’ll show you just how easy it is to access this massive wealth of great game titles.

What You Need

So before we start you’re going to need a couple of things.

First you need a modded PlayStation 3. If you haven’t modded yours yet then check out either my PS3HEN video or, if you’ve got a compatible model, my custom firmware episode. If you’re not sure which method to use, PS3HEN can be installed on any PlayStation 3. Custom firmware gives you a few extras, but can only be installed on phat, and earlier slim  models. For full details see the CFW video.

Once you’ve got your console ready all you need is an FAT32 formatted USB drive to initially get some software transferred over to your PS3. If you’re not sure how to create that then check out my FAT32 drive video.

Of course you’ll also need some legally obtained game backup files, but we’ll look at those a little later on.

Apps

To start the installation we need to get hold of some homebrew apps. We’ll be copying these onto FAT32 USB drive so make sure you’ve got that plugged in to your PC.

If you head over to the Brewology website and go onto the PS3 apps section you can scroll down the list until you get to the webMAN MOD listing. Opening that up will give you a number of download links. We need to top full package download. This will download the actual package file so you can put that directly onto the root folder of your USB drive.

Next we need to think about how we’ll be moving game files onto the console. Some of these are larger than 4GB so we can’t use the normal FAT32 drive, these only allow files up to 4GB. I’ve already covered using more modern NTFS drives to transfer games so please do have a look at my full PS3 game installation video for full details. But basically we need two more apps to make that happen, Simple File Manager and Prep-ISO. The alternative is to use FTP and again I’ve covered that in a separate video so check that one out. In this video the basic conclusion was that FTP is fastest option, but only if you can connect your PS3 to your router via ethernet, otherwise use the NTFS drive method. WiFi on the PlayStation 3 is slow – very slow!

The last application we need is a PSP launcher. webMAN MOD can mount PS2 and PS1 or PSX game disks and run them. But for PSP it needs some extra help. We’ll be using the Cobra PSP Launcher. You’ll find this in the emulators section on Brewology. Inside that listing you’ll see a number of versions. We want the PSP Remasters Launcher Fixed variant. So again download that package file onto the root of your USB drive.

At this point I’ll just mention that if you find these downloads start adding archive files to your drive, either .zip or .7z, you’ll need to extract the .pkg files from them and put those on the root of your USB drive. But hopefully when to watch this it will still be .pkg file downloads.

Lastly we have an optional step. I say optional, but you really do want to do this. This step will download all the game box art for PS3, PS2 and PS1 games and install them onto your console. Mostly your console will gather these images as you go but this step just makes sure that everything you need to show off your collection is saved directly into the correct place on your system so our game launcher apps look fantastic with full game images.

If you head over to this repository you’ll get to a section of Aldostools github account. Aldo Vargas does an immense amount of work to make our PlayStation 3 consoles such great gaming devices. So please do consider a small donation to help him keep up the great work.

On the github repo you’ll see two links for PS3 and PS2/PS1 image downloads. Again these will be package files so just save them to the root folder of your USB drive.

So that’s all the code downloads we need. Let’s get all that installed.

Installing the Homebrew Apps

Power on your PS3 and plug in the USB drive. If you’re using PS3HEN make sure you activate it.

Then go to the package manager option on the XMB game menu and select that. Then go to the install package option and then standard location.

You should see a list of the apps you downloaded. You now need to install each of these in turn. Just highlight the app you want to install and select it. Once it’s finished installing go back to the package manager and install the next.

Note that the two image packages do take a bit of time to install as there are a lot of files, so don’t stress if it looks like they have stalled, just leave them to run through.

Once you’ve installed the packages we need to fully install webMANMOD. The package only installs the installer code. So on the XMB go down to the webMANMOD installer icon. Don’t select it yet. We need to hold down the L1 shoulder button to make sure we install the full application.

Once that has installed you’ll find a new webMANMOD section on the XMB so we can delete the installer app to keep things clean. Just highlight the app icon and press the triangle button. You’ll see some options appear so just select delete and that will remove the installer app.

Now that we’ve got all the apps installed we now need some games.

Game Files

As usual I’m not able to point you directly to download sites but they are out there on the Internet, just search around and you’ll find them. Do however be careful that you don’t download any files that you don’t have permission to use. If you’re not sure check out my retro gaming copyright video to keep on the right side of the law.

The game files you find will come in a range of formats.

For our PS3 games we want ISO backup files. These will come in two sub formats, either encrypted or decrypted. If when you find one it has either a .key or .dkey file associated with it you’ll have an encrypted Iso file. Just download the key file and key that with the ISO game file. The code on our PS3 will know what to do and will be able to decrypt the Iso files if it has access to the key file.

PS2 files will come as ISO backups. These are just the raw disk dumps and we can use them just as they are.

Similarly our PSP files will just come as simple ISO files.

The Original PlayStation, or PS1, or PSX games are slightly different. These are usually in cue / bin format and these are the files we need for this setup. Each game disk will have a .cue file and some associated .bin files. You need all of these to get the game to work.

Once we’ve got the game files we’ll need to get them transferred over to the internal hard drive on our PlayStation 3.

There are a few ways to do this. In my main PS3 games video I used an NTFS formatted USB drive that allowed me to copy full ISO backup files across to the PS3. If you want to use this method then please have a look at that video and how to use the Simple File Manager app.

But if you’re able to connect your PS3 up to your network router via an Ethernet cable we can get the fastest transfers by using the built in FTP server in webMAN MOD. Again I made a full video on this so watch that if you need more information. In this episode I’ll going to quickly run through the setup and copy over the files so please do refer back to that video if you get stuck.

Transferring the Game Files

The game files have to go into special folders on your PS3 hard drive. He easiest way is to assemble them into these folders on your transfer disk or PC.

PS3 games go into a PS3ISIO folder, all capital letters.

PS2 games in a PS2ISO folder and PSP into a PSPISO folder.

PS1 games will go into a PSXISO folder, but you need to put each set of game files into its own subfolder as I’ve done here.

We can now simply copy these folders onto the root of our PS3 drive the game files will end up in the correct place.

For FTP transfer we first need to find the IP address of our PlayStation. This is on the network settings area in the XMB menus.

Once we have that we can use an FTP client program on our computer to connect to the PlayStation using this IP address. The FTP account doesn’t need any usernames or passwords so we can just connect directly to get access to the console’s drives.

If we target the dev_hdd0 drive you’ll probably already have the various ISO folders in place. Either way we now just need to upload our prepared ISO folders to the root of the drive. Depending on how many games you’re copying this will take some time.

Once all the game files are copied over it’s time to play some games.

WebMAN MOD

To launch the games we’ll use webMAN MOD.

On the XMB games section go up to the webMAN Games option, press X to select it and you’ll see listings for each of the PlayStation models we’ve loaded games for.

First off, we need to get webMAN MOD to sync itself with the games we’ve just copied over. So select the webMAN Setup section and then the Refresh webMAN games and XMB option. WebMAN will now rescan our ISO folders to find our new games.

Once that has done its work the XMB will reload so we can go and see what games we’ve got.

Go back to the webMAN section and then select the PS3 section.

You should see all your PS3 titles listed, hopefully with the box artwork. To play a game simply select it. WebMAN will then mount the ISO backup file as a virtual disk in the PlayStation 3 and then automatically launch the game.

So that’s our PS3 games up and running.

PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 1 Games

Next we can have a look at our PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 1 games. But before we try launching any we need to do a little bit of setting up. The PS2 and PS1 used memory cards to store our save game data. Without these you had to start each game from the beginning every time you played. Luckily webMAN MOD can emulate these memory cards.

On the main XMB Games menu go up to the Memory Card Utility. We want to create a new memory card and this wants to be a PlayStation 2 memory card. Although you have to play a lot of games to fill a card, this may well happen so this utility lets you create multiple cards. It’s useful to give them a name so you know which game saves are on which cards. Once you’ve done that the card needs to be inserted into one of the two virtual memory card slots. If like me this is your first card it will automatically be inserted into slot 1.

Once we’ve created a PS2 card just repeat the process and create a PS1 or PSX card for our Original PlayStation game saves. After you have named the card you’ll probably get a prompt to assign a slot for it. To do this we need to go back to the memory card utility screen and highlight the card we want to assign into a slot. Find your PS card and press the triangle button to bring up the options menu. Then assign this one to slot two so that we have one PS2 and one PS1 memory card ready to go.

We’re now ready to play some games.

Go down to the webMAN Games section and then to either the PlayStation 2 or PlayStation 1 listings. You’ll see your games listed but probably not with any box art. webMAN doesn’t seem to pick up on these consoles very well, but there are ways around this that I’ll cover in another video. For now just find the game you want by name and select it. This will mount the game and start the emulator.

PSP Games

For the final PlayStation console, the PlayStation Portable. We’ll be making use of the standalone emulator app we installed at the start. In the XMB Game menu you’ll see the listing for the PSP Remaster Launcher, but we don’t need to use it directly. webMAN again comes to help us by automatically understanding that this app will launch our PSP games.

So all we need to do is to go to our webMAN section, then into the PSP games list and then simply select the game we want to play. This will launch the PSP Remaster application and our game will start.