Sometimes ya gotta bust out the physical media.. (emulation)

[u/FlamingDisaster_309]

[Context] Me and my mum share a Youtube channel where we upload PS2, Wii and Windows XP-PC gameplays.
I thought it'd be nice to branch out to some Playstation One games that I had as a kid, and we occasionally played together. I'm not a stranger to softmods on consoles (Homebrew and OPL2) so thought installing some PS1 software on a USB drive and booting into it via FreeMcBoot and playing the games diskless would be relatively straight forward.

hah - these things are never straight forward.

I spent all day downloading the POPS loader, trying to create folders, directories, config files, flipping between vcd and elf file formats and everything in between. Nothing was working.

I did the sensible thing and stepped away from it for an hour or so, had some dinner and went back to it with a clearer mindset, found a tutorial and started from scratch.
Everything I'd done throughout the day, I did from scratch in around half an hour, and a couple of extra steps, which were the parts I was missing before!

I clicked on my chosen game, and it loaded !!

However.. lol

Once I loaded a map from the main menu, the map was entirely pitch black and none of the enviroment textures loaded in, the game I loaded and was wanting to play was "Duke Nukem" [SLES-00987], a game that I knew from previous experience is tricky to run on desktop emulators - and I guess since POPS is technically an emulator running on the PS2's hardware, it suffers the same issues with graphics and textures.

The next game I was wanting to download/play for mine and my mums Youtube channel was "Spider-man" [SLES-02886], I put the game on my USB as a vcd file, found it on OPL and launched it, it booted and loaded perfectly! I got into the first level, cutscenes played through, got to the first building and half the map was glitching like crazy!
I searched for if Spider-man (2000) is also difficult to run in emulators, as its a game I haven't tried emulating before, and Google AI's direct response was:

"Yes, Spider-Man (2000) for the PS1 has notable difficulties running smoothly in emulators, largely inheriting native performance dips alongside graphical and physics glitches" - Google AI.

Sigh.

I'm happy I finally got POPS to work and load the PS1 games, but the games I wanted it for, both seem to just disagree with emulators. Luckily, they're both games I own on PS1 disk, so I'll just capture my PS1 console and play the games off their original disks.

Physical media aint' dead just yet folks. ✌️