First of all, if you only have an iPhone 2G / 3G, you don’t need to read further – games are just too slow. The situation is somewhat better on the second-generation iPod Touch because of the faster CPU. Nevertheless, few very-very games run playable on even the 2nd-generation iPod Touch.
If, on the other hand, you have a 3G S and you definitely want to play some titles, you might want to read on.
In order to emulate the Playstation, you’ll need the following:
- If your phone isn’t already jailbroken, jailbreak it
- Search for and install pxs4iphone in Cydia
- Upload your decompressed ROM images (supported file formats are .ISO, .IMG, .BIN, .Z and .ZNX.) into
/var/mobile/Media/ROMs/PSX/
- Also get "scph1001.bin". If you don’t find it anywhere, I’ve made it accessible for you
HERE
- Start pxs4iphone, select the ROM image, the orientation and whether you need sound (the latter is stuttering with most titles and is, therefore, useless)
- Play (or, at least, try to play…)
Very few (if any) PSX games run at their full speed. I think reports like “Fullspeed or at least 90% (but start up screens are slow)” (that of NFS Porsche Unleashed)
HERE, in the official Wiki page are greatly exaggerated – the game is far from it and is barely playable. (Native iPhone games are waaay faster and they may also make use of other control methods like the accelerometer; in addition, they make full use of the screen estate, as opposed to the 320*240 center area utilized by pxs4iphone.)
I’ve produced two 30 fps videos showing NFS Porsche Unleashed and Frogger running on my 3G S. They’re available
HERE (NFS Porsche Unleashed). The Frogger video will only be posted later. (It takes ages to upload a 200 Mbyte AVI file to YouTube from home.)
All in all, you will only want to play games like Final Fantasy VII – that is, titles (or any similar ones) not being natively present on the platform.
