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** Beetle PSX is the name of the RetroArch fork of Mednafen PSX. It has several experimental modifications and enhancements that aren't present in the standalone version, including a widescreen hack, CPU overclocking for smoother framerates, and increasing the internal resolution up to 8x. Increasing the resolution carries a ''heavy'' performance cost, however, since graphics are rendered in software; an alternative core exists for hardware rendering.
* [[PCSX-R]] is an open-source [[Recommended_PS1_Plugins|plugin]]-based emulator. The main reason to use this over mednafen is because that its internal resolution can be raised with little to no performance hits.** '''PGXP''' is a fork of PCSX-R that adds texture correction, polygon wobble reduction, and polygon culling reduction. It also adds CPU overclocking, and allows a hack that was originally disabled in PCSX-R.** PCSX-ReARMed is an ARM port of PCSX-R, sharing a similar core, but optimized for portable handheld devices. The biggest draw is its NEON software renderer, which is both fast and accurate, and has the ability to render at higher resolutions without resorting to HLE plugins.
* [[ePSXe]] is a fairly standard [[Recommended_PS1_Plugins|plugin]]-based emulator like PCSX-R, and as such the accuracy is typically about the same between the two. Its closed-source nature has had it constantly lagging behind in features, which is why it's not recommended. <small>A developer had also edited the [[PS1 Tests]] page in preparation for version 2.0.0, representing a conflict of interest.</small> Since version 1.8.0, ePSXe has also been commercially available on Android, but it's also not recommended.
* [[MAME]] is a very broad emulator known to support thousands of systems. It has a focus for accuracy, much like Mednafen, but when it comes to the "Sony PlayStation" driver (<code>psj</code>), the developers still call it "preliminary", and have marked it as "Not Working". It can boot to the BIOS and launch games, but much like they say, you can expect bugs, especially between hardware revisions. The MAME project as a whole remains active, but don't expect it to work any time soon.
* [[PCSX2]] is a PlayStation 2 emulator, but emulation of a hardware feature has been merged into the main project that allows the same backwards backward compatibility with PS1 games. However, one thing to note is that backwards backward compatibility in the original PS2 hardware didn't cover all games in the PS1 library, and these limitations still extend to PCSX2's emulation.
For an in-depth analysis of each emulator on a technical level, check out [[PS1 Tests]].
There is no [[wikipedia:Z-buffering|z-buffer]] in the hardware. This can cause things like polygons to pop over others; the limbs on Tekken characters are a good example of this. It is theoretically possible to implement this, but it wouldn't be accurate to the hardware.<ref name="forum.emu-russia">{{cite web|url=https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&u=http://forum.emu-russia.net/viewtopic.php?p=17237|title=Plugin info, news. / Information about the plugin, news. (gpuBladeSoft discussion) |publisher=forum.emu-russia|accessdate=2018-04-03|date=2011-09-16}}</ref>
When perspective correction isn't applied to textures, certain viewing angles can make them distorted, more so when an object is near the edge of the camera up close. ''Tenchu: Stealth Assassins'' is particularly infamous for texture distortion, most noticeably in the [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oBeO-cui_c training level] where floor textures appear wavy at oblique angles; developers typically mitigate this by adding polygons to walls, floors , and other scenery, though at the cost of filling the PlayStation's geometry rate. This has been solved in at least one emulator.
Many PlayStation games dither to varying degrees due to having a low color depth. On most TVs, this dithering would blend in order to make new colors and smooth gradients. Plugin-based emulators usually have graphical plugins that use a 32-bit color depth, which removes dithering, while software-rendered plugins and emulators tend to retain it. While higher color depth can be considered an enhancement, since it results in less noise and smooth gradients, some think of dithering as seen on real hardware as added shading and texture, especially on untextured polygons. The emulators that use software rendering and can increase the internal resolution are capable of retaining dithering for the shading and texturing aspect, and it's made more subtle by shrinking the artifacts.
==Resources==
* [http://ns348841.ip-91-121-109.eu/psxdata/sitenews.html PlayStation DataCenter] - Tons of PS1 related things. Emulator files like plugins, game manuals, game configurations, and many tutorials are just some of the things you'll find here.
*[https://archive.org/details/psx_redump_usa_20141221 ReDump PS1] USA set.
