ePSXe on Linux

[Sarteck]

Okay, I've got two major problems:

a) I'm a newb on Linux, and
4: I'm a newb to emulation.

Heh. Sure, I know a few things, I can get around, but by and large, I just want to put my disk in the tray, load up the game, and play. :3

I've got a few older games that I've been wanting to play for a while now, so (since my PSX was lost and my PS2 doesn't save right for PSX games) I've turned to emulation. After struggling though the initial setup of some plugins and ePSXe itself with the aid of various tutorials, I've got ePSXe 1.6.0 and 1.5.2 both up and running on my Dapper Drake release of Ubuntu (and learned quite a few things in the process, like how to compile things, heh).

The problem is... Well, everything is slow and ****ty. Heh. I've been trying to get FF9 to work, specifically (and after some failed attempts at trying to make my own ISO's, I'm giving up and just downloading some--that's still legal, right, so long as I own the game?). The play itself is a bit choppy (though the FMVs are fairly nice), and I finally found some sound settings that I can be somewhat happy with. I had some problems with the battle swirls that I finally seem to have fixed, but the game still seems to vary in speeds when I enter battles (going from normal, to real slow, to real fast, back to real slow, etc.).

Anyways, I'm assuming this all has to do with my plugins. I've been having a hell of a time trying to find decent up-to-date plugins for Linux, and (as a newb to emulation) I'm not even sure if they are the ones I should have. Heh.

• P.E.Op.S. SoftX Driver 1.17
• P.E.Op.S. OSS Audio Driver 1.09
• No CDR driver (ePSXe just uses /dev/cdrom), but when I start using the ISO I'm downloading, I guess I'll have to get one
• The "1001.bin" BIOS thingie

So, those of you that run ePSXe on your Linux machines, what have you found to be the best plugins to use? I'm running a fairly old machine (1.2GHz, 224MB RAM, ProSavage vid card, some VIA Audio card, etc.), mind you...

[JKKDARK]

Wrong. Download games is illegal. If you want ISO's, make from your own game.

[Sarteck]

The problem there is that I get to about 51% on my first disk, and them my ISO utilities (both Kiso and K3b) quit on me. :/

[brettb]

This is a little script I wrote to rip psx games. You can
probably find other uses for it though. First of all, you'll
need cdrdao and bin2iso installed.

Once that's done, you'll need to scan your optical drives
to see how cdrdao names them:

$ cdrdao scanbus
<snip>
ATA:1,0,0      MAT****A, DVD-ROM SR-8175, G228

Your output will be different, depending on your actual drives.
What we're interested in is the first section of the output, in
this case ATA:1,0,0. Remember that. Now, on to the script:

#!/bin/bash
cdrdao read-cd --device ATA:1,0,0 --driver generic-mmc-raw --read-raw \
 --datafile $1.bin $1.toc;
rm $1.toc;
bin2iso $1.cue -c $1.bin

Replace the device id with whatever one you prefer for ripping.
Save that file as 'mkbincue', or whatever you want really.
Move it to the directory where you save you psx images.
Now chmod it:

$ chmod +x mkbincue

What that does is let you eXecute that script. Now for an
example:

$ ./mkbincue ff7d1

You have to type that './' in front of the name for it to work
(unless the directory you're in is in your PATH, but anyway..).
The lone argument this script takes will end up being the
name of the bin/cue pair that will be created, in this case
Final Fantasy 7, disc 1.

If you need more info, post back.