FAQ

PSIO is simply a flash cartridge and development cartridge that plugs into your PlayStation’s Parallel I/O Port. It allows you to instantly see your games and developed programs running from an SD Card on real hardware which makes it the ultimate developers tool as well as making it invaluable for debugging. It is only for PlayStation 1 consoles that bare the Parallel Port I/O connection.

PSIO does not emulate PlayStation software. PSIO is an emulator of the CD-ROM co-processor (SUB-CPU). That being said, it is a hardware emulator, which, is almost identical to the original Sony CD-ROM MCU.

Yes. PSIO is essentially a Flash Cart.

Yes. The data streams at the original data rate of a CD-ROM, but because there are no seek times, data rate failures or seek/spin-up times, this is where the huge increase in speed is.

High quality custom designed and developed products aren’t cheap to manufacture, market and sell. Also, in comparison to other Flash Carts on the market, ours is at a very good price point.

As of 01/JULY/2022, out of all official 2,435 software titles PSIO is so far 99.5% compatible.

For more detailed information, please see our ‘Compatibility‘ database on JIRA (NOTE: “Wipeout XL/2097” and “Crash Team Racing” are perfectly playable, but have minor issues).

If you’d like to know how we got this 99.5% compatible calculation, take the games listed in JIRA that do not work at all, and minus it by the total amount of PSX games (IE: 2,435). Then, divide those two numbers and get the percentage (example).

There are some games which may also have problems that have been reported on our Forums, and you may see the list and follow the reports here.

Please note that as we tweak and work to improve the code accuracy of PSIO, some firmware updates may break games that were previously working. Do not worry however, we always manage to fix them in a later update. It is critical that you use the latest firmwares and report any problems to us so we know about them.

Note that not every PlayStation game is 650 MB, so you may be able to fit a lot more games than the table below based off of the math formula ((SD SIZE * 1024) / 650). Also, take into account that each MULTI-DISC image should be treated as a separate game.

– 4 GB will fit ~6 games.
– 8 GB will fit ~12 games.
– 32 GB will fit ~50 games.
– 64 GB will fit ~100 games.
– 128 GB will fit ~200 games.
– 256 GB will fit ~400 games.
– 512 GB will fit ~800 games.
– 1 TB will fit ~1,600 games (this is way over half the entire PlayStation library on one card).

PSIO was developed and designed in both Australia and Russia by Cybdyn Systems. Whilst PSIO is assembled in Australia, the parts required to assemble the cartridges are manufactured in China.

Please login to your account by hovering over the ‘Support’ tab and clicking on ‘My Account’. Alternatively, please click here.

Please login to your account by hovering over the ‘Support’ tab and clicking on ‘My Account’. Alternatively, please click here. Once logged in, simply edit your ‘Shipping Address’. Note that it will change to your new address once we manually update your order (which will be when we process it for shipment).

No.

The latency will come down to your TV setup. For example, if you use a CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) TV which the PlayStation was designed for there will be almost zero latency. However, if you use a modern day TV such as LCD (Liquid Crystal Display), most if not all have high-latency which will effect your gameplay. Some LCD TV’s have a ‘gaming mode’ which can help however.

Yes. An internal modification is required. We have developed a small printed circuit board (PCB) that detects whether a PSIO cartridge is plugged in or not and routes two very important signals to the Parallel Port (Sony never did this for us when they designed the PlayStation unfortunately). We have called this little device, the “Switch Board”. The Switch Board consists of nothing more than a 4066 Quad Bilateral Switch, a few resistors, a diode and a capacitor. More information may be found here, including the circuit diagram.

If you don’t want to touch your original console for nostalgic reasons, we suggest buying a second hand console and using it instead to have the Switch Board installed into. That way your original console stays the same and you have a used second hand unit to modify and play on.

Please see here.

No.

Yes, even if you have one PlayStation console running a game from PSIO and another from a CD-ROM.

“Sigh-Oh” or “Psy-Oh”. It’s abbreviated for “PS1O” (the “I” is actually a roman numeral).

Sure do! They copyrighted the word “PSIO” (all English letters), but our logo actually contains the number 1 (one). The “I” in our wording/logo for “PSIO” is actually a roman numeral, which for us, makes “PS1O”. As for the term “PlayStation Input Output”, this has nothing to do with the abbreviation of the word “PSIO” and is just a string of coincidental characters.

Shipping costs will be automatically calculated for you on checkout. Simply select your desired shipping option when prompted (generally, the more expensive the shipping the quicker it will arrive to you once we ship it).

Yes. We ship to almost every country.

No. We refuse to use their services.

No. We only sell and ship PSIO on this website (under our company name Cybdyn Systems) and through selected distributors which we partnered contracts with.

The only payment methods available are Credit Card (via Visa and Mastercard), Bank Transfer and Bitcoin.

When an SD Card with the correct file is inserted into PSIO, a custom built Menu System boots up each and every time you turn on your PlayStation. This is called the “PSIO Menu System”. This Menu System runs on the PlayStation hardware directly, and allows you to select and boot software from the SD Card using the controller. Demonstration images of the Menu System running can be found under the ‘Features’ tab.

There are just under 50,000 lines, all hand written from scratch for the Menu System, Fastboot logic and System Loader. The FPGA and ARM logic consists of triple that amount.

Yes, you can toggle an option in the Menu System to enable or disable such a feature. For more information, please read the ‘Systems Manual’ (available on our ‘Downloads‘ page).

Yes, so long as the Switch Board has been installed correctly, there is an option in the Menu System to boot from the CD-ROM drive directly. You may also simply unplug your PSIO cartridge to return your PlayStation back to regular stock-standard operation.

Originally in previous early firmwares this was true, but later on we removed it since it proved to be problematic. Instead, a controller in Port 2 can now be used so a GunCon can be left plugged into Port 1.

No, but we may add support for it at a later date.

Again yes, so long as the Switch Board has been installed correctly, you may unplug PSIO and plug in your other game cartridge where it will then function perfectly normal.

Yes. All official licensed Sony (1st party) peripherals will work normally with PSIO.

Yes. The PlayStation Parallel Port can handle up to 3 megabytes per second on the system bus. The original CD-ROM (at 2x speed) could read at a maximum of 352 kilobytes per second, so there is plenty of bandwidth available.

No, even if (hypothetically) your cartridge somehow developed a short circuit, the internal fuses on the PlayStation’s voltage rails would go open circuit before any hazard or fault is even perceived.

It will work in all regions. This includes PAL, NTSC-U/C and NTSC-J.

Not all software will run, and we are unsure what ones will fail without testing of each and every software title in its library.
With that being said, usually we can fix the problem with a firmware update if you let us know the exact problem.
You may however see what software has been tested here.

We recommend that your CD-ROM discs are ripped 1:1, without any errors whatsoever, as a *.BIN and *.CUE format. Other formats you may use however are *.ISO and *.IMG.

Yes, your software title should work with PSIO. If your software does not work, please let us know, and we will flag it in the Compatibility section for others to know about. We will then start to look into it to try and resolve the issue as soon as we can so it will be working in the next firmware update.

Yes, however you will need to play over RGB video output. Otherwise, you will need to do a modification to the PlayStation mainboard in order to generate the correct colour frequency for your TV to accept and display an output correctly.

No.

Yes. You can complete games which use multiple discs since PSIO supports real-time disc swapping. Please read our ‘Systems Manual’ for information on how to set this up.

You can watch video as a Sony STR format in a resolution of 320×256 at 15 Frames per Second in Stereo with 44.1KHz audio (MPEG frames interleaved with XA).

No. The USB port on PSIO is to stream software image data from a PC only.

The PSone and SCPH-900x series will not support PSIO since they do not have a Parallel I/O port. However, we have had a lot of people ask if we offer such an option, so we may develop a special version that will not include the PIO header connector on the PCB. It will essentially just be a circuit board with an SD Card slot that you can solder to your PSone or SCPH-900x series PlayStation. However, you will be required to solder 40 wires from this special version of PSIO to the PSone or SCPH-900x mainboard manually. When we have news in regards to this, we will announce it, so please don’t ask us when we will be making it.

PSIO began as a concept on August 15th, 2010. The first prototype was then made in 2012. What we have created is a ‘one of a kind’ device, and nothing else exists like it. A lot of work has gone into PSIO (especially the polishing aspect), so we hope you will enjoy it.

The PS2, PS3, PS4 and PS5 all emulate the PlayStation 1 hardware using a software processing technique instead of direct hardware (with the PS2 being a semi-exception due to a mix of both). They are inaccurate, glitchy and add extremely high latency response times. PlayStation 1 titles were never designed to be played like that. Many users have problems when playing them and using PSIO on the original PlayStation 1 hardware eliminates those issues entirely.

The PlayStation CD-ROM drive when brand new was decent quality. However, since the systems launch in 1994, the laser assembly has deteriorated, and it is impossible to find a brand new one since they are no longer made. The ‘new’ ones available online are fake, low quality replicas. Since then, software now freezes, music skips and sometimes games will not load anything at all due to this fact. PSIO removes all of these problems, and also decreases the load times dramatically since there are no more moving parts, and we have faster available bandwidth on the parallel port. With PSIO, you can literally shake the PlayStation console whilst playing a game and it will not skip nor freeze.

Australia does not use an IBAN to receive funds. If you’re in doubt, please ask your bank for assistance on how to send money to an Australian Bank Account.

The “CE” and/or the “FCC” certifications do not apply to us since we are an Australian registered company selling in Australia. It is your responsibility as the consumer to check the laws of importing an electronic device without the said certification(s). Note however that these licenses are mostly there to check the product that is being sold to the the consumer is safe and will not cause harm to you or other electronic devices (mostly to do with radio frequency and high levels of electromagnetic interference).

PSIO was designed with the highest quality components and with safety as the top priority. It is extremely low powered and the electromagnetic and radio frequency activity is also extremely low. Here is a spectrum analysis output of the noise levels from PSIO. At a distance of 1 centimeter from the top front side of the circuit board, the noise levels are 30 decibels (peak). On the reverse side, it’s 15 decibels (peak). You can also see some spikes in the image below, and this is when the system clock line is pulsed. They are about every 50 megahertz with the weaker ones every 25 megahertz. The peak is around 300 megahertz which seems to be emitted from the ARM microcontroller.

PSIO RF

No. We don’t allow it for legal reasons. We could enable such a feature however since we know how to get around it obviously, but we wont.

The PlayStation classic is a software emulator which contains pre-loaded games which can not be changed, nor can you load any of your own games on it (unless you hack it). Using it for development is also not a possibility. You can’t also use your original Memory Cards to save games and other peripherals such as light guns and racing wheels will not work.

With PSIO however, you are free to backup your discs and play them as originally intended on the original hardware. You can also use your genuine Sony peripherals which you may own from the original console released in 1994. Overall, PSIO offers a whole lot more whilst giving you the true classic PlayStation experience the way it was meant to be.

78 millimetres or 3.07 inches.

Currently the maximum limit is 1000 games.

Check that your system can communicate with the Google servers for ReCaptcha. If they cannot (due to a firewall problem, etc) then it will not work. If you need more help, please contact Google Support.

Licenses need to be transferred by the original PSIO Cartridge owner. The owner needs to login to their account here and then proceed to the ‘Account Details’ options in order to change their email address. Once they change it to yours, you can send a request to reset your password by attempting to login to the account. Once done, you will then be able to login using your email address and use it for firmware downloads.

If you have purchased from a wholesaler (EG: Stone Age Gamer), there is no way to change the email address. It is locked to the wholesaler.

We highly recommend using ‘SanDisk’ SD Cards. In particular, we reccomend ‘SanDisk Ultra’ SD Cards. They typically have a silver label and are U1 Class 10 cards rated at 80 MB/s. We have also had success with ‘SanDisk Extreme Pro’ cards which are U3 Class 10 cards rated at 170 MB/s.

We don’t recommend using Micro SD Cards in a standard form factor adapter as we have had problems reported when using these. It is best to use the full size standard form factor SD Cards.

Unfortunately no. If we did have a phone, it would put too much stress on us since we’d have people calling all the time. Besides that, the hours to call would be difficult for a majority of users as we are located in Australia (GMT+10), not to mention trying to understand non-English speakers over poor quality long distance phone lines would be frustrating. The best way to contact us is via our Service Desk (JIRA Service Management) which can be found by clicking on the ‘Contact’ button.

Sorry, no. It is your responsibility to inform us within 4 weeks of the shipment date if the tracking has not updated. If your package has been missing for 4 months, you will have to contact your local post office as the tracking number has long since expired and there is nothing we can do about it since it is long expired as we have zero proof or evidence knowing whether it was actually delivered or not.