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PS1

DuckStation

Émulateur PlayStation moderne et précis avec amélioration graphique

Easy15 minPS1 BIOS required
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In this guide

DuckStation is by far the best PlayStation emulator available today: accurate, fast, and easy to configure. It needs the console's BIOS, extracted from your own PS1.

1. The BIOS

  1. A PS1 BIOS is 512 KiB in the vast majority of cases; DuckStation also accepts the rarer 2 or 4 MiB images. On the other hand, an unusual size — a few kilobytes, or several dozen megabytes — points to a corrupted file or one that isn't a BIOS at all.
  2. Depending on your console's region, it will be named SCPH5501.bin (US), SCPH1001.bin, SCPH5502.bin (EU)… Case doesn't matter.
  3. Place it directly in the bios folder, with no subfolder.
    On Windows: Documents/DuckStation/bios. In the portable version: the bios folder next to the executable.
  4. In the emulator: Settings → BIOS, select it from the drop-down list.
  5. If it doesn't show up, click Rescan BIOS / Refresh.

2. Game formats

.cue/.bin, .chd, .pbp, .m3u. CHD is the best choice: lossless compression, a single file per game.

Multi-disc game? Create an .m3u file listing the discs in order, one per line. DuckStation will handle disc swapping on its own.

3. Recommended settings

  • Renderer: Vulkan or Direct3D 11.
  • Internal resolution: 4x for a very clean image — the PS1 is lightweight, your machine can handle it.
  • Texture filtering: disabled if you want to stay true to the original look.
  • PGXP "Geometry Correction": fixes the wobbly polygons typical of the console. Worth trying.

4. Not working?

  • "BIOS image not found" → wrong folder, or the file was placed in a subfolder.
  • The game starts but the screen stays black → try a BIOS from the same region as the game; some titles are sensitive to this.