Drastic Compression for PS1 games on PSP

January 13th, 2007, 15:58 Posted By: Vega

Some informative information on playing PS1 games on your PSP has come to light. 1gig memory stick users should read on.

The following method should help to make PS1games run without all the extra padding originally placed on the disc. If you're wondering what that means, it's this: Imagine playing a 500MB game using only 50 MB of space.

You'll need something called CDGenPS2. If you follow the steps, you should be able to get a game to play with a drastically smaller file size. Its Still in the test Stages, but has proven to work on a number of games.

PS1 and PS2 games use a very strict architecture for how the binary files of the games are organized on a discs. When a disc copying program copies these discs, it's known that they will leave the padding of empty bits (0xFF) for the remainder of the XXXMB media.

For example, Tetris Plus for the PS1 has a total file size on the disc of 43.0 MB and the image from CloneCD is 566MB. However, if you try to remove the padding from a disc, it will no longer work with emulators, including POPS. A utility for those who load games from their PS2 hard drives to lessen the size of the images, known as CDGENPS2 (Much like UMD-GEN), has the ability to remove this padding and keep the structure of the disc intact. Using this utility with some software that can extract an ISO to its contents can bring the 566MB Tetris Plus image down to about 50MB (POPS compresses it to about 400MB).

How to do it:

1. Extract the ISO contents to a folder on your hard drive.
2. Open that folder and select ALL of the extracted contents from the root of the disc.
3. Open CDGENPS2.
4. Drag the contents of the folder into the CDGENPS2 window (the giant white space that says ISO near the top)
5. (Optional) Go to file-> Edit Volume and change the name of the volume so that it matches the original title of the game (for archival reasons only).
6. Click the IMG button on the left-hand side of the screen and save the Bin/ISO/IMG to whatever directory you want , and use POPS to convert to PSP EBOOT and test it.


Play around with CDGenPS2 and post up your results. You can download it right here (Windows users only). This software is Freeware.

Again, this is only in testing stages and some games may not work, but it cant harm to try

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