A few days ago, the PlayStation Classic’s security door was blown wide open and it became possible to sideload your own PlayStation 1 games on it. However, doing this with gpghax (a massively publicised hack that wasn’t meant to be the go-to solution) was a bit difficult and the software solution itself had some issues. Now, adding your games can be done safely without you touching any database files thanks to BleemSync!

What is BleemSync?

BleemSync, presumably named after an early commercial PS1 emulator for the PC called “Bleem!“, is a piece of software created to make it much easier to add custom games to your PlayStation Classic. This is done by automating the game database generation process so that you don’t have to mess with any database file even if you want to add/remove multiple games.

This game adding/inject solution also has the advantage of being designed to run natively off a USB pendrive so that the games/software that come with the PlayStation Classic are left untouched. To play any PS1 game on your PlayStation Classic with BleemSync, you need:

A 4GB+ pen drive titled “SONY” that’s formatted either as FAT32 or EXT4 I personally recommend to go with FAT32 especially if you’re using it with Windows Many PS1 games are a few hundred of MBs in size so anything smaller than 4GB won’t let you copy much games but you can still use a 2GB pen drive if you wish

A computer running Windows, macOS or Linux

BIN/CUE files (game dumps) for the PlayStation 1 games you want to play These should be obtained from your own copies as downloading old games without paying is still considered as piracy

Preferably, a PNG image (of resolution 226×226 to avoid stretching) of the box art for the game you’re adding

The main person behind BleemSync is Pat Hartl although many people have also chipped in to make BleemSync possible. These include justMaku, CompCon, madmonkey, DanTheMan827 and Yifan Lu who was on the forefront of PlayStation Classic hacking.

How do I use it?

After fulfilling the prerequisites listed above, you can use BleemSync to sideload ANY PS1 game to your PlayStation Classic by following the instructions below:

Download the BleemSync ZIP file from this link. Make you sure select the correct platform when choosing the ZIP file to download The Windows version requires Windows 7 x86 to work but when I tried it on Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-bit, I got an error regarding “hostfxr.dll” even after installing suggested .NET Core prerequisites. It seems that you may need to install Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition according to one issue report to get this to work on certain editions of Windows.

Copy the extracted contents of the ZIP file to the pen drive mentioned above.

Go to the BleemSync directory on your pen drive (you should’ve copied it in the step above) and open a command prompt/terminal window there

Add games to the “Games” directory on the root of your pen drive as described here.

Run the BleemSync executable from the command prompt/terminal window you previously opened

Plug the pen drive into your PlayStation Classic, turn it on and enjoy!

Note: I couldn’t test these instructions myself as I don’t have a PlayStation Classic but I was able to create a Database file with BleemSync. Instructions are based on the README

Conclusion

Thanks to BleemSync, you can add games to your PlayStation Classic without any risks as messing up your console is virtually impossible even if you fail to follow the instructions properly. Without a doubt, this shows the dedication of the homebrew community as BleemSync is a pretty complete solution released a few days after the PlayStation Classic hit store shelves!

Finally, the PlayStation Classic can be considered as a somewhat worthy Christmas present if you don’t want to tinker around with something that can do much more, like a second-hand PC or a hacked PSTV, but still want to give a nice gift that looks like the PlayStation 1!

UPDATE: Apparently, Bleem! wasn’t the first PS1 emulator for the PC, that was PSEmu Pro; it was the first commercial PS1 emulator tho. Thanks @Sonikku_a2 (Robert Petersen) for the correction 🙂