How to turn the PS1 savefiles of games played on PSP, to a regular savefile usable in PS1 emulators and retro emulation devices like the Miyoo Mini Plus
Once again I’m here writing some quick notes on the adventures I had today setting up my Miyoo Mini Plus.
I had a few PS1 games on EBOOT.PBP format on my PSP, which have worked quite well so far, but the savefile format only works on the PSP itself and nothing more.
Since my move to the Miyoo Mini Plus, and me deciding to switch my PS1 gaming to it from the time being, I had to figure out how to transfer those savefiles over.
First off: figuring out which savefile is which.
The easiest way to know what save corresponds to what game is to open the game in you PSP, save, exit and then connect the device to a computer and sort by date.
The next best way is to look for your game in the PSX Data Center using Ctrl+F (there are lists for games in PAL and Japanese regions which can be seen there as well) and then finding the corresponding code.
The PSP has its savefiles located in the path PSP/SAVEDATA/ and it probably contains a bunch of folders with titles like this SLES01734 or SLUS00585, the file that has a matching code will be the one.
Opening the folder you will find a PNG file, usually of the game cover art, which will confirm it is the game we want.
Finally, you can use the online website Save File Converter to convert your saves from the PSP’s .VMP to proper PS1 save files in the .mcr format.
Note that The Miyoo Mini Plus will not recognize this filename extension, however it is as simple as renaming the filename extension to .srm instead.
Now, the format of the ROM file itself is a different story.
PSP runs EBOOT.PBP files, you can use these files in the Miyoo Mini Plus, just copy paste it to the proper location and change the name to Game_Name.pbp. Note that if the file comes with some KEYS.BIN and other extra files, it will probably not work in the MM+, but I haven’t looked into how to fix that.
The Miyoo Mini Plus supports .chd and the regular .cue and .bin roms. The .chd format is the smallest in size and the compression is lossless, so I see no reason not to use it. The easiest way would be to source it directly in that file format, but you can also convert .cue/.bin files by using the chdman command line tool. This is located in the mame package in Void Linux, it is a standalone program in Arch as well.
Run this command and you are good to go:
chdman createcd -i "Resident Evil 3 - Nemesis (USA).cue" -o "Resident Evil 3 - Nemesis (USA).chd"
If you install parallel you can do batch conversion of files, with this line:
parallel chdman createcd -i {} -o {.}.chd ::: *.cue
Which will convert all the .cuefiles in the working directory to .chd.
Feel free to check the official documentation for more information about running PS1 games on Onion OS.
This is day 44 of #100DaysToOffload and post 12 of #WeblogPoMo2024
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