Convert PSOne saved games on Playstation 3 to PC for use in pSX emulator HOWTO

Copyright 2009 Warren Togami <warren@togami.com>
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Table of Contents
  1. Introduction
  2. Required Tools
  3. Procedure
1. Introduction

Last year I bought the classic Playstation One game Chrono Cross.  It is one of the greatest games of all time, like its predecessor Chrono Trigger for the Super Nintendo.  Gamespot rated Chrono Cross a perfect 10 out of 10.

To my horror, I found that the game is effectively unplayable due to bugs in Playstation 3's emulation.  The Net has scattered reports like this of anguished cries ignored by Sony.  Apparently Sony has long ago stopped development of the PSOne and PS2 emulation on the PS3, so this bug will likely never be fixed.  The bug seems to be a race condition that triggers when your characters or an enemy casts a spell.  Some battlegrounds are heavily animated, causing the PS3's PSOne emulation to be bogged down.  You see the frames slow and the music plays slowly.  If the spell casting animation happens during this slow-down, the game is highly likely to get stuck.  I tried to play through the game anyway.  Some parts of the game can be brute forced by playing it 50 times and by luck you might be able to get through a battle without the race condition deadlocking the game.  But some parts like the S.S. Invincible or obtaining the Einlanzer are nearly impossible because of extended length battles and heavy background animation.  Frustrated with the broken Playstation 3 emulation, I gave up entirely for a few months.



I eventually figured out that it was possible to run the game that I bought and paid for on the pSX emulator.  I suppose other emulators like ePSXe might work better, but ePSXe for Linux hasn't been updated since 2003 and is thus ancient and broken.  pSX is not without problems, it gets confused by modern ALSA and pulseaudio, but it can be made to work with some workarounds.  It is sad that none of these PSX emulators are open source.  It seem this particular bug could be easily fixed if source were available.  I am excited to discover that the PS3 controller plugged in via USB is automatically is now automatically detected by Linux and configured as a joystick.  You can easily map the buttons of the PS3 controller to the virtual Dualshock in pSX and things thereafter just work.  It seems somebody wrote drivers to use the PS3 controller in Bluetooth wireless mode with Linux as the host.  Check out the videos on that page.  Pretty cool.

Now that Chrono Cross was seemingly working in the  pSX emulator, I wanted to copy my saved game file from the PS3 to the PC.  This guide describes the procedure to do so.  It is fun that this introduction is much longer than the HOWTO.  This page really exists to praise the timeless awesomeness of Chrono Cross.

2. Required Tools
3. Procedure
  1. Start Playstation 3
  2. Locate exactly which saved game you want to copy.  You might need to run the game to figure out the desired slot number.
  3. Hit the Triangle button on the saved game, select Copy, hit up a few times to select your USB stick.
  4. It will be saved on the stick in ps3\export\psv\ with a filename like BASLUSP0104155535472524F3032.PSV.  This file is a single saved game.  (Unrelated to this guide but worth mentioning: It seems to be digitally signed to discourage editing the file and copying back on the PS3, because someone can cheat in a game too easily.  If you want to copy a single saved game to the PS3, the only way to do it is with Sony's PS2 memory card to USB adapter.)
  5. Run PSV Exporter, open that PSV file and save it as a MCS file.  MCS seems to mean "memory card, single save".
  6. Run PSX Game Edit.  Create a new Memory Card.  Open the MCS file.  Save the Memory Card.
  7. That MC file you just saved can be used directly by the pSX emulator.