Setting up your XStation (PS1)

Your Playstation is equipped with an Optical Drive Emulator (ODE), which means that physical disc games are not required!
Instead, you upload your gaming library to the SD card, and choose your game, and play it, without changing out discs in your system.

Let’s get your games set up and get you gaming!

Your xStation comes with a MicroSD card included. You can skip right to the Adding your ROMs section of this guide.

Setting up the MicroSD Card

First, it is recommended to do a format of the SD card you wish to use. xStation supports FAT32 and exFAT. exFAT is the recommended format.
I personally use Rufus on Windows to format all SD cards. You can use many other utilities as well, this part is up to you.

Once the SD card is formatted, create a new folder on the card called “00xstation”. Place the extracted latest release in this folder on your card. Insert the MicroSD into your xStation, and turn on the Playstation.

Adding your ROMs

xStation supports BIN/CUE files, uncompressed. I can’t guide you on how to acquire these ROMs, or how to rip your games. There are other resources for that online. Rumor has it that there is an internet archive somewhere that has full archives of games, but you didn’t hear that from me.

Each game (BIN/CUE pair) should be placed in its own folder. For example, the game WipeoutXL:

Create a folder called WipeoutXL on your xStation’s root. This is the same directory as the folder with the “00xstation” folder. Place the wipeoutxl.bin and wipeoutxl.cue in this folder. That’s it!

You can also arrange the games for easier viewing. Create Folders named A-Z, and place the game folders into the appropriate letter folder instead. xStation will recursively search through folders and subfolders when adding games to the main list.

Playing your games

When you have your folders and games all set on the MicroSD card, insert it back into your xStation. The next time you turn the power on to your Playstation, you will be presented with a list of games. Simply choose a game and start playing! It’s that simple.

You can choose to Fast Load or Full Load a game. Fast loading bypasses the Playstation’s initial boot screen, and full loading does the opposite. I recommend full loading all of your names. Not only for the cool nostalgia factor of the Playstation’s boot sequence, but for full compatibility of games.

Multi disc games: Playlists

If you are playing a RPG or some other game that uses multiple discs, you can create a playlist before loading the game. Select all of the discs you would like to be added to the playlist, and then load the game.

To “change discs”, open and close the Playstation’s cd cover, and the xStation will load the next disc in the playlist.