Best format to keep PS1 games in?

[darkfalzx]

Up until now I've been storing my PS1 library in individual .7z files, which wasn't a problem with stand-alone ePSXe, which loaded them natively, but now that Retroarch PCSX Rearmed core isn't wrecking havoc with my setup (as it did for a while), this storage format is becoming a pain.

Not only is the startup time extra long due to each file needing to be extracted, but it doesn't work with multi-disk games. It also doesn't play nice with the Display BIOS Animation option.

Is there a more versatile but still compact format I can keep my files in for use with PCSX Rearmed core?

Edited November 25, 2020 by darkfalzx

[zugswang]

23 minutes ago, darkfalzx said:

Up until now I've been storing my PS1 library in individual .7z files, which wasn't a problem with stand-alone ePSXe, which loaded them natively, but now that Retroarch PCSX Rearmed core isn't wrecking havoc with my setup (as it did for a while), this storage format is becoming a pain.

Not only is the startup time extra long due to each file needing to be extracted, but it doesn't work with multi-disk games. It also doesn't play nice with the Display BIOS Animation option.

Is there a more versatile but still compact format I can keep my files in for use with PCSX Rearmed core?

I recommend keeping all your games as bin/cue within the zip file

For multi games, I converted all my games to pbp format, as keeping them bin/cue they don't work in multi games for RocketLauncher using RetroArch, so probably the same with Launchbox

[neil9000]

Id recommend CHD personally. Also i wouldnt use the PCSX rearmed core, thats not very good and is really for use on Arm devices, hence the name. You should use one of the Beetle/Mednafen cores.

[darkfalzx]

I had nothing but trouble with the Mednafen PSX core. Maybe it's some quirk of my setup, but it kept randomly breaking controls all over Retroarch to the point where I had to delete retroarch.cfg and reconfigure it from scratch. To this day it's the only core that did this not once, but 4 or 5 times.

Is there a good GUI utility for converting cue/bin to CHD? I used the command line converter before, but it always felt like I'm one step away from screwing something up.

Edited November 25, 2020 by darkfalzx

[zugswang]

15 hours ago, neil9000 said:

Id recommend CHD personally. Also i wouldnt use the PCSX rearmed core, thats not very good and is really for use on Arm devices, hence the name. You should use one of the Beetle/Mednafen cores.

In my experience you will find as you work your way through the games many won't load using CHD's (1,800+ on PS1) as I found when trying to convert to CHD.

What people usually do is try a couple of games once converted and assume they will all work, but they don't.

Bin/cue for me are the best, but as stated, for multi disc I used pbp.

Also PCSXR stand alone emulator is also very good.

Also, try these other PS1 cores, as you may find you need to mix them up for specific games:

duckstation_libretro.dll
mednafen_psx_hw_libretro.dll
mednafen_psx_libretro.dll
pcsx_rearmed_libretro.dll

 

[Peridot]

If you want to keep your games compressed, I'd recommend switching to rar5 (which is the standard now) instead of 7z. Both have the same level of compression, but rar extracts a lot faster than 7z, a lot.

I used to have them all in rar but now I switched to chd so the compression is the same but the games load instantly. I'm in the process of testing all the games, so far no issues.