PlayStation Classic mixes PAL and NTSC games - and the results disappoint
Something's up with the Sony PlayStation Classic - what should be a celebration of a truly iconic console is compromised by an uneven selection of games, sub-par emulation and the bizarre choice of using a mixture of both NTSC and PAL games in a machine with a locked 60Hz high definition output.
The unit certainly looks the part, successfully replicating the look of original hardware but measuring just 47x104x33mm - a mere 45 per cent of the volume of the original machine - and as Sony says, smaller than the footprint of a PlayStation 4 game case. Two replica PlayStation controllers are included - and these are facsimiles of the original controller, meaning digital control input only. This connects to the micro-console via USB. Powered by a mobile ARM chipset, the PlayStation Classic doesn't require much juice - you can power it using a micro USB phone charger, which is just as well as weirdly, there is no power adapter in the box. This is actually something of an issue as the unit is a little fussy about where it's plugged in - hooking it up to a USB 3.0 port on a PC didn't work, while plugging it into an HDTV was fine.
Going into this one, the hope was that the quality of the emulation would be high, as Sony has an excellent history in supporting PlayStation titles on later consoles, debuting its first emulator for the PlayStation Portable (PSP), with further successes on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita. However, it's understood that proprietary emulation developed by Sony itself was used on those systems, while the small print suggests that the PlayStation Classic uses a mobile port of the PCSX emulator instead.
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