You Can Edit the PlayStation Classic’s Emulator Settings With a Keyboard

The PlayStation Classic released this week, and some players aren’t happy with its limited emulation settings. A number of the games included are the PAL versions rather than the NTSC versions, resulting in slower gameplay, and features like scanlines — present on the SNES Classic — are nowhere to be found. However, a clever user discovered a trick that can make your experience much better.

YouTube user Retro Gaming Arts and his friend Matt were messing around with the PlayStation Classic, and Matt discovered that if you plug a USB keyboard into the console, start one of its games, and hit the “Escape” key, you’re given access to the emulator’s settings.

From here, you have several different options. You can disable the frame limiter, turn frame skip on and off, and load past save states. You can even turn up the brightness on the scanlines for an experience better suited to your television or room.

But as you can see in the video, messing around with these settings for certain games can result in them no longer working. A “reset” option is in the settings, which can reverse the changes you’ve made, but you should only try this out if you’re willing to let your new $100 system potentially become a very light brick.

Additionally, not all keyboards appear to work. Viewers told Retro Gaming Arts after his video was uploaded that Logitech and Corsair keyboards seem to be compatible. He also said he tried plugging a USB storage device into one of the system’s ports, but was unable to access anything. It might be a little tougher to dump the PlayStation’s entire library onto this system than it was to put every SNES game onto the SNES Classic.

The PlayStation Classic comes with 20 games from the original PlayStation, including masterpieces like Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy VII. Some of the system’s better-known exclusives such as Spyro the Dragon and Crash Bandicoot have been left off, however, likely because publisher Activision released remastered versions of them for current-generation systems. Still, if you want to play Twisted Metal or Syphon Filter, the PlayStation Classic has you covered.