Which one of these you use will depend on what video drivers you’re using and the power of your PC (shaders can be quite graphics-intensive). Here, aside from the “presets” folder, you’ll find three categories of shaders – cg, glsl and slang. You can smooth out edges using various degrees of antialiasing, give a border to your game, or try to recreate the authentic experience of playing on a 90s screen by adding a little bit of noise or scanlines to the image. Shaders are visual filters that let you add all kinds of crazy stuff over your in-game graphics.

Widescreen Mode Hack – This will result in some visual glitches on the outer borders of your screen but should look good in most games.

PGXP Vertex Cache and Perspective Correct Texturing – Turn these on.

Memory + CPU does look good in some games but can break others. Set it to “memory only” for the least visual glitches.

PGXP Operation Mode – Turn this on to take advantage of some of the benefits of RetroArch PS1 emulation.

Wireframe/full VRAM – Leave these alone.

Internal color depth – Change this from the 16bpp default to 32bpp for a bump in color depth at minimal performance cost.

Texture filtering – Multiple settings, but xBR and SABR are the best and shouldn’t require too much performance.

These aren’t exact, but they’re pretty much what you should expect out of quality – we recommend using 8x if your hardware can handle it, or even 16x if you want to forgo the need for AA and have the hardware power for it.

Internal GPU resolution – Native is 240p, 2x is 480p, 4x is 720p, 8x is 1080p, and 16x is 4K.

Software framebuffer/adaptive smoothing – Keep these on.

Note that if the ripped PS1 game is divided into different audio tracks, you should copy them all into the online tool as well, so all the game files are contained in one “cue” file. Just drag-and-drop the game’s img or bin file into the box on the site, and it will generate the “cue” file text for it. If for whatever reason you don’t have the “cue” file accompanying your “bin” file, or if your ripped PS1 game is in another format like “img”, then you’ll need to create a “cue” file for that game and put it into the same folder as the main image file.Ĭreating a CUE file is simple enough, and to make it even simpler you can use this online tool to generate the text for a cue file. This will essentially divide the output files into the BIN file, which stores most of the game data, and the CUE file, which is what Retroarch searches for when you scan for PS1 games. When you rip a PS1 game, you should always make sure that you do it into the BIN or BIN/CUE format. Having problems with Retroarch? Take a look at our list of Retroarch fixes and see if they help. Now, let’s get to the juicy stuff: installing the emulation core. Some games may work without a BIOS, but for full compatibility we highly recommend one. If you’ve followed up to to this point, your controller is ready to use, and you’ve acquired the PS1 bios file(s) that you’ll need to play your games. What we can tell you is that the most common bios files are:

PS1 bios file corresponding to the global region of the game you want to play (US, Japan and Europe being the most common), placed into the ‘system’ folder of RetroarchĮxpanding slightly on the note of BIOS files, we can’t legally tell you where to download these.

A modern Windows PC for best performance (and the most accurate guide) though RetroArch is cross-platform enough for this guide to work on other platforms.

If using a non-Xbox pad, make sure you have an XInput driver/wrapper enabled. I recommend a PS3 pad for that authentic control experience or an Xbox One pad for better support.

This is the case for leading RetroArch PS1 core, Beetle PSX, which we’ll be teaching you how to install and use in this article.Īlso read: How to Set Up RetroArch, The Open-Source Cross-Platform Retro Game Emulator PS1 BIOS, Gamepad, and Other Things You Needįor optimal RetroArch PS1 emulation, you’ll want the following:

Some emulators, however, are actually made just for RetroArch, and because of this they may even be better than modern standalone emulators on the scene. RetroArch’s emulators, called “cores,” are generally ported emulators from other developers in the scene. Emulating games on PC usually means a full emulator and different program per platform, but RetroArch can actually emulate quite a large number of systems, all within a single program. RetroArch isn’t an emulator in and of itself – think of it as a hub for emulators and media accessible under a single, unified interface.

Ps1 mac emulator using disc