The PlayStation Classic has been released, and it looks like the fan community may have found a solution to some of its shortcomings. The emulation and presentation may be lousy out of the box, but the system is wide open for anyone who wants to experiment with the option menus Sony didn’t include in the system’s front end.
All you have to do is connect certain USB keyboards and hit the ESC button. You can see the hidden menus in the video above, although people are reporting that not every keyboard will allow you to access these options. We weren’t able to access the hidden menus using Apple, Logitech or Razer keyboards. You’re also running the risk of bricking your new toy by going behind the scenes in this way, so proceed at your own risk.
The existence of these options makes sense; the PlayStation Classic runs the open-source PCSX ReARMed emulator, which offers a solid amount of flexibility and options to the users. The options weren’t removed before the product shipped, instead Sony just hid the menus so that most players would never find them.
The menus are extensive, and seem to offer quite a bit of tweaking potential. There are options to change the video output mode; you are given the ability to add scan lines; and it looks like you may be able to play the included games with an analog controller.
Besides “load cd image”, this is the most promising thing I saw in there... pic.twitter.com/9X83GuHnv4
— Supcat @ Hot Sounds Island (@supcat) December 4, 2018
There is also an option to reset the system to its default settings, which could be helpful if you change something that causes the system to act erratically. It won’t be long until fans have found the best options to improve the performance of the included games, and it’s possible that players will soon be able to use the PlayStation Classic hardware to play other PlayStation games that Sony neglected to include.