With the rise of retro, many people are getting old consoles and among them the mythical gray PlayStation. In addition, if you are lucky, you will have achieved it with a CRT television to be able to enjoy it in the conditions for which it was designed. However, one of the most common problems is the CD drive. Well, did you know that it is possible to use a Raspberry Pi Pico on your PlayStation to give it a MicroSD reader? Well, that’s what PicoStation is.
Over time many old systems that used CD drives have ended up breaking and unless you are a collector of old games who knows how to keep them in perfect condition, then many of the optical discs end up degrading. A very common solution is to provide them with a MicroSD card reader, which allows you to load a card with several games. It is an ideal solution for users and collectors of these systems who are not looking to continue downgrading their games, but want to continue enjoying them without problems.
PicoStation, a MicroSD reader for the original PlayStation
Well, for several different things, one of them is to give it a MicroSD card reader from which to load the games in a much faster and more efficient way than the old CD-ROM reader that the console uses and that will allow us to have a collection of games. console in a comfortable way and without having to get up continuously to change the game every time we feel like enjoying a different title.
Although the idea of using a MicroSD on PlayStation is not new, doing it with a Raspberry Pi Pico is, and we owe the project to Paulo7x8 , who has designed this emulator for the legendary console’s disk drive. Which uses the reduced version of the most popular SBC in the world as an interface between the console and the card reader. Which is ideal for resurrecting systems with a broken reader, which we know are not few.
At the moment the project has not been released to the public by its creator, so that we can make our PicoStation with our Pi Pico and give a second life to the SONY gray one and be able to enjoy again with the games that marked your childhood or discover some of the ones you missed. If you have been able to get one recently on the second-hand market, it is an improvement, to say the least, quite interesting.
Forget about horrible loading screens
One of the biggest problems with games on SONY’s first console was horrendous loading times, where the stage loading screen would keep appearing and in games where there were continuous changes of scenery. This is because media like CD-ROMs are not good at finding and transmitting random data. The fact of playing an original PlayStation with the games on a MicroSD means almost immediate loading times and games that were insufferable due to the long waits can now be enjoyed without problems.
And yes, we know that there are already many projects of the same type, but the interesting thing about the PicoStation is the fact that anyone can replicate it with a Raspberry Pi Pico, which means not having to pay huge amounts of money for a modification of this type. . For this reason we are waiting to see how it evolves in order to give a new life to what was, without a doubt, the most popular video game system of the nineties.
