PlayStation’s Social Media Director Sid Shuman announced a bunch of new details about the Playstation Classic this week. There’s actually a ton of insight into the technical details of the retro console, as well as how some of the system works.
For example, the startup screen will bring you back to the mid-nineties with the PSOne splash screen, before booting into the actual menus. Players will be able to easily access the 20 pre-loaded games, all of which run on the built-in open-source emulator.
The PlayStation Classic will also have built-in in-game save functionality allowing you to have up to 15 saves per game. This will work almost identically to the original save and memory card management function of the original console. One additional related aspect is how the Reset system works. If you press Reset during gameplay, you get put back into the main menu, but the console will save your spot in the game you played most recently as a Resume Point. The Open button is essentially a disc swap, which will allow you to swap discs in games with more than one.
Over at Kotaku Chris Kohler brought out some more details about how the actual gameplay will work on the console, by way of it’s emulation. According to him, PlayStation Classic will use a fork of the PCSX emulator called PCSX ReArmed. This open-source emulator is a pretty good choice, and it’s easy to see why Sony would have chosen to go this route.
Frank Cifaldi, founder of the Video Game History Foundation, gave gamers some great insight on this topic. Various times throughout the history of gaming have seen the use of open-source projects being used to support official re-releases of classic games, and they usually turn out fine. And since the ability to shift development time and resources allows for more focus in other areas, it should help the quality of the final product.
In terms of other areas of the Playstation Classic, it does come with two controllers, so you should be able to play with a friend or family member right away.
The PlayStation Classic is set to launch on December 3, 2018, and will cost $99.99.
