Quickstart Guide: Setting up Mednafen for Speedruns (w/ Mednaffe)

Guide by duke1102 Version 1.0 - May 01 2018

I. FOREWORD

Not everyone has a non-modded NTSC Playstation 2 and a disc of the game available. For several reasons people stuck to ePSXe as their main emulator for Playstation 1 games, but ePSXe lacks in some aspects.

Mednafen is a multi-system emulator and does a better job with emulating PSX games closer to a real console. The only reason holding people from using it is the seemingly intimidating configuration and no graphical user interface for it. Luckily there are several graphical frontends you can use with it. In this guide I will explain the use of "Mednaffe".

II. INSTALLATION

Before we can start setting up the emulator you have to obviously download a few things.

1. The Mednafen Emulator Windows 64bit Version: https://mednafen.github.io/releases/files/mednafen-1.21.3-win64.zip Other Versions: https://mednafen.github.io/releases/

2. The Mednaffe Frontend Windows Version: https://github.com/AmatCoder/mednaffe/releases/download/0.8.8/mednaffe-0.8.8-win.zip

3. Playstation NTSC BIOS (SCPH-5501) You either have to dump it from a console yourself or simply ask Google for it.

After you downloaded those 3 things, unzip Mednafen and Mednaffe to a location you like. To make it easy, put the PSX BIOS into the same location.

Now start the "mednaffe.exe" and you will probably be greeted with a warning message that the Mednafen executable is not installed in path. Click "Yes" here and select the location of the mednafen.exe in your Mednafen directory.

A command prompt window might pop up and show some error, simply ignore it and carry on. The Mednaffe interface should show up now. At the top click on the tab named "Systems" and then choose the Sony Playstation from the list there.

Under "Default region to use" select "na". Further down click the "Open" button on the "Path to the North American SCPH-5501 ROM BIOS" and select the location of your BIOS file. In the "Filters" and "Resolution" tabs you can do some small tweaks on how the game will render and the size of the window. Via the "Input" tab you can map your Controller or Keyboard to your liking. It's basically self-explanatory.

Now you can load up a PSX game by clicking the "File" menu and "Open ROM". It might be wise to take a couple of extra configuration steps though in the "Global Settings" tab. Uncheck "Enable Cheats" in the "Miscellanous" settings, change some hotkeys via "Key Assignments" to prevent accidental fast-forwarding during runs and specify the "Paths" for some things.