As preface, nobody who actually cares about games gives a shit about 240p on a cathode ray tube display, and any well-adjusted person will simply play Playstation games via Duckstation or something instead. That is the way to do it.

If you suck and you’re me though, you might have found one of those 30" Toshiba TVs with the Orion tubes from like 2000 for free and decided to do something about it. Aside from CRTs being basically cooler OLEDs (deep deep contrast, bright colours, but also instant response time) 240p is actually pretty funny looking. There’s nothing wrong with playing these games on a flatpanel with scanlines, some scanline settings and filters are actually very good. But look at these progressively drawn lines of phosphorescent light:

So maybe if you’re as deranged as I am, you wanna play Playstation games with black inbetween every line on this radiation phosphor machine, how do? There’s no way to load PS1 backups from a hard drive or SD card on a FreeMcBoot PS2 that I know of, (if possible please hmu) and while modern x86 PCs can be made to output 240p it’s kind of a bear involving goofy software config and a weird component converter. You can buy a Raspberry Pi 3/4/5 or Orange Pi, which have composite video out that is pretty good and can do 240p. There are even LakkaTV builds for 240p for these things.

But to my mind, the most efficient option is Wiistation. If you’re a you probably have at least one Wii sitting around. I have three, one of which I found in a literal garbage bin at my last job. Your Wii has also possibly been supplanted: not only is Dolphin a really good emulator, but also a Wii U can do absolutely anything a Wii can on a flatpanel. But for whatever reason, the Wii U does not do 240p, where the Wii does.

If you look around on useless loser spots like stormfront, the “common knowledge” is that the Wii is ‘just not cut out for PS1 emulation’. This was true back when WiiSXR was the only option, akin to how Wii64 is not very good. But since 2022, some utter nerd has been patching up that PCSX fork as WiiStation and it’s actually really good.

It has HID controller support, so you can hook up a Dualshock 3 for some authenticity but the Wii Classic Controller Pro stands in for a PS1 Dualshock pretty well. It has disc swapping, tons of options, and it keeps getting cool and funny updates that make it perform better. Most recent one came out in March.

I have tested WiiStation with a bunch of hard to run (for low-end systems) Playstation games, like Vagrant Story, the original Driver, Klonoa Door to Phantomile, Metal Gear Solid, Ridge Racer Type 4, Wipeout 3 SE all work great at 100% speed. So what doesn’t work? Tekken 3 drops the occasional frame (down to 59.10fps) but is mostly pretty good, Neversoft’s PS1 Spider-Man is a shockingly difficult game to run and tanks into the 40fps zone routinely. It’s been performing better as the dev improves CDDA streaming and stuff but it’s a torture test for this emulator.

WiiStation also has pretty much the same compatibility issues as PCSX: you’ll remember from this essay that the Playstation version of classic alltime great Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together is a hacked together mess full of fucked up code. It runs pretty well on WiiStation, but still spits out “Failed to load save.” when loading any save from memcard. Idk what is wrong with PCSX’s save format, but you could use savestates exclusively to get through. I might submit an issue on the github to be hilarious about it.

Wii homebrew development is extremely sleepy at the moment and nobody really talks about it, so it’s not surprising that WiiStation flew under the radar. The Wii already has a killer niche as a dirt-cheap 240p gaming machine to hook up to a CRT for NES, Master System, Mega Drive, and SNES stuff, so to me adding “it’s a pretty dang good Playstation as well” to its resume is funny. I like that about it.