Tutorial: How to save space on PS1 games without ripping video or music

[Blue Protoman]

Playstation games take up a lot of space. A real shame. You COULD remove the dummy files inside them if you wanted. (Dummy files pad out the disc image to improve load times on real systems.) But this is a mess. I tried it and wound up with a nonworking game. Thankfully, PCSX-ReARMed supports PSP EBOOTs, which take up less space. To give you an idea, I cut Armored Core down from 500 to 246 MB!

You will need a Playstation 1 game, whether you ripped your own or not. ISO, CUE, BIN, PBP, IMG, or MDF files will work. If you have the original disc, you will need to rip it before you start. If your rip has ".ecm" at the end of the filename, you will need to treat it with Un-ECM before you start (simply drag the file onto the program).

Step 1
Download Popstation GUI v3.00 Beta. It's supposedly Windows only, but it works perfectly in WINE if you install the Visual Basic 6 runtime (you can do so via Winetricks). Extract the contents of the archive and put them wherever you'd like.

Step 2
Go down to "Customize the EBOOT" and uncheck all of the boxes. These are for the PSP menu (icon, sound effect, screenshot, etc). No need for any of that here, it'll just take up space.

Step 3
Load your game in "PSX Image File", and select where you'd like it to output the result. If you have a CUE file, make sure to select that. Otherwise, the disc image itself will do. Set the compression up to 9. The better the compression, the less space the game takes up, but the slower it loads. I've found that the loading times aren't too bothersome anyway, so don't worry about that. You can also ignore the contents of the second box.

Step 4
Hit "Go" and wait! It'll take a few minutes for a game to be converted. The file should end up as "EBOOT.PBP". Rename it to whatever you'd like, and you're done! The file is ready to be used!

Thanks to Wally for his help!

 

[WizardStan]

I'm not entirely sure what PSP EBOOTs are for. I know that they're for playing PS1 games on the PSP, but I dunno if it's native, through an emulator, or what. But that's irrelevant. On with the show!

eboot is the native "executable" format of the PSP. It's the PND of PSP, if you will. All the PSPs download games, whether it be PSX or actual PSP games and demos are in eboot, including firmware upgrades and most homebrew.


As far as PS1 games on the PSP, as I understand it the core the PSP is basically just an upgraded PS1, so it doesn't require a full emulator, just some extra work to move stuff around a bit. Kinda like virtualization on a PC, I think, but not exactly. Maybe more like WINE? Somewhere between the two.

 

[Blue Protoman]

Ah, cool, thanks.

 

[sebt3]

PocketISO will produce way smaller ISO files as it also delete the videos.

 

[DavidBowman]

eboot is the native "executable" format of the PSP. It's the PND of PSP, if you will. All the PSPs download games, whether it be PSX or actual PSP games and demos are in eboot, including firmware upgrades and most homebrew.


As far as PS1 games on the PSP, as I understand it the core the PSP is basically just an upgraded PS1, so it doesn't require a full emulator, just some extra work to move stuff around a bit. Kinda like virtualization on a PC, I think, but not exactly. Maybe more like WINE? Somewhere between the two.

Both your understanding and your analogy are correct. The PS1 emulator was flawless because it wasn't really an emulator, more of a comparability layer like WINE (and the eboot had a basic ISO file with the emulator as a wrapper - that kinda makes it more like Ginge in a PND in that respect, actually). The original PSP firmware (1.0) had no security on eboots whatsoever, and the homebrew community was born immediately for it when it was released (which I thought was pretty cool). I kept up with the PSP scene until about the time when the second generation slim PSP was released.


I used to do a LOT of PSP stuff. I even helped the original author of the program BP uses in his tutorial do some testing for it (years ago, only minor stuff) and I was a "moderator" for his forums (we were ALL moderators and we all screwed with each other's posts incessantly. It was a blast!). Anyway Zingaburga (the author of Popstation GUI) is a good guy, and very helpful.

 

[andyhamer]

Followed your guide to the letter, everything i have have converted: unsupported/invalid CD image..??

 

[Blue Protoman]

Was it a bad image initially? What was the filename? You ARE using R8, right?

 

[andyhamer]

Was it a bad image initially? What was the filename? You ARE using R8, right?


[/quote


Tried over 15 so far, ripped from my own disks in different formats Bin/Cue, Iso, Mdf etc.. they all worked on rearmed and Epsxe before, i am using R8, can you elaborate "What was the filename"

 

[Blue Protoman]

Never mind. Anyone else who can corroborate this?

 

[notaz]

As far as PS1 games on the PSP, as I understand it the core the PSP is basically just an upgraded PS1, so it doesn't require a full emulator, just some extra work to move stuff around a bit. Kinda like virtualization on a PC, I think, but not exactly. Maybe more like WINE? Somewhere between the two.

This is only true for the GPU part, it supports texture formats natively but display lists still have to be converted. As for other parts, they are emulated more or less traditionally, except the SPU, which is emulated on second PSP's CPU from what I've read. The GPU part is important though, graphics often takes 2/3 of whole emulation time on pandora.

Followed your guide to the letter, everything i have have converted: unsupported/invalid CD image..??

This sounds like a corruption of your card, or pandora is unable to read it for some reason..

 

[Exophase]

Even with the crossover in paletted texture formats I don't think PSP's GPU is really 100% compatible with PS1's. Hence the glitches you see in a lot of games on POPS.


Probably one of the biggest benefits to emulating 3D stuff on PSP is how low level of an interface you have to the GPU, where you can setup command lists for it to be parsed directly. On OpenGL ES 2.0 devices the drivers can add a tremendous amount of overhead, especially if you want to do a lot of draw calls with a lot of state changes. This is of big benefit for POPS and Daedalus.


It'd be neat if someone tried this kind of low level 3D programming on Wiz/Caanoo, since the user guide for Pollux gives enough information on how to do so (not that it'd be easy).

 

[DaMummy]

dont know if this applies to this as well, but using umdgen for psp isos to convert them to cso, between compression 9 and 1, would usually only save 1-5mb per game, while loading times were massively hit in some cases if compression 9 was used instead of 1. something to keep in mind

 

[EvilDragon]

PocketISO will produce way smaller ISO files as it also delete the videos.

Yep, that's why I use PocketISO for my files as well


It also works without any issues using Wine

 

[Blue Protoman]

dont know if this applies to this as well, but using umdgen for psp isos to convert them to cso, between compression 9 and 1, would usually only save 1-5mb per game, while loading times were massively hit in some cases if compression 9 was used instead of 1. something to keep in mind

But the PSP is not of concern here.

 

[DavidBowman]

I think his point was that the small amount of space you'd save from compression has a high trade-off because of the speed hit that you'd take.

 

[Blue Protoman]

On the PSP, I can't say. But things still load reasonably on the Pandora.

 

[MarioPandio]

Well to back you up in at least one game, I've just shrunk PAL Tenchu down from .img format (701.2mb) to eboot (458.3mb) and it boots 2 seconds faster and plays faster at a lower mhz in r8.


It didn't like Tekken3 however, stating it was an invalid file type etc, so perhaps it wont work for everything.


Thanks for the heads up Blue Protoman as I'd forgotten r8 had added eboot support, although actually it also works with r6 aswell! Thanks again notaz B)

 

[DaMummy]

how to convert ps1 games that have multiple bin files?i dont mean 2 disc games, but one disc, in like 15 track bin files?

 

[lancesg1]

So you mean to tell me the 30gbs of ps1eboots I have for my PSP will work with emulator. Best news I found out today

 

[Blue Protoman]

how to convert ps1 games that have multiple bin files?i dont mean 2 disc games, but one disc, in like 15 track bin files?

I have no idea. I tried that with a rip of Wipeout 3, but it only used the first .bin. I'd try again, such multi-bin rips are rare.