Android Phones Get a Playstation Emulator

If you can deal with imperfect sound and, more importantly, don’t mind a bit of the old video game piracy, the Android Market has a way for you to enjoy original Playstation games on a smartphone. The app is PSX4Droid, and it’s a fully-functional Playstation emulator for high-end Android phones, available now for $6 in the Android Market.

Here’s a video of someone playing Crash Bandicoot on a Nexus One. It looks pretty good minus the occasional stutter, but the sound is prone to speeding up and slowing down. Also, the player accidentally taps the phone’s menu button once — a frustration that should be familiar to anyone who’s played Android games with virtual buttons on the sides. But for RPGs in which timing isn’t essential — and there are plenty of those for PSOne — PSX4Droid should get the job done. There is Wii remote support for folks who absolutely need physical buttons.

Playing ROMs that are this recent — Sony sells lots of PSOne games for PSP and Playstation 3 — falls outside of my comfort zone, but I guess it’s Sony’s loss for trying to beat smartphones with the PSP instead of joining them with its own official emulator. [Engadget via The Escapist]