The Playstation Classic hasn’t even been out a week and already the console has been “hacked” in some small form. Not even 24 hours after the console’s release to completely negative reviews and some opinion posts trashing the console outright, it seems that this latest bit of bad news can be taken with a gain of salt and turned into positive news for those awaiting a modified version of the console like many have done with the Nintendo NES Classic or SNES Classic.
As you can see from the video above, a Youtube channel called Retro Gaming Artists found the menu for the Playstation Classic’s PCSX ReARMed emulator, the open source PSX emulator that is used on most Android devices. How did they find this secret menu? Well all they did was plug in a USB keyboard to the console and press the ESC button… simple! Now as the Youtubers themselves state in the video, while there are a lot of great features and fixes you can make via this menu, it is easy to mess your Playstation Classic up in a major way to the point of not having games or anything work at all. So if you’re someone who wants to mess around with the features of the console, then do so at your own risk.
https://twitter.com/Nibellion/status/1069873514512031744
So what exactly can you do with this secret menu? Well besides the aforementioned screwing things up hardcore, you can:
- Change the region of the device so that it reads NTSC at all times
- You can add scanlines and make the old CRT experience complete
- Change the software filter
- Possibly add/change the BIOS of the console
- Maybe find a way to add games to the library or run via external media (At this time, trying to load from an external USB drive creates a Linux error)
But this isn’t where it ends with the Playstation Classic. According to Wololo.net, a site dedicated to news about the emulation and hacking scene, people have been able to dump the Playstation Classic firmware onto their PC and are already working on the encryption of that firmware so that things like the hakchi2 software for the Nintendo NES/SNES Classic is possible. This means that sometime in the future, people will be able to remove the games they do not want from the Playstation Classic and replace them with something more interesting and to their liking.
