Thanks to one of our awesome Phandroid readers, I stumbled upon a rather amazing breakthrough over on XDA. Apparently, a developer named yifanlu has been hard at work looking for a way to reverse engineer the native Playstation One emulator found on the Xperia Play to play converted custom ISO’s.

Well, after a week of nonstop work, yifanlu has managed to get an ISO of Crash Bandicoot 3 up and running on the Xperia Play and the results are near perfect. Here’s a video as proof of his efforts:

According to yifanlu, everything is fully functional except for “manual” (instruction manual) and multi-disc games.

Now I just need to write the GUI [program to convert ISO to APK]. No more then a day for that. As much as I hate Java in every way, I feel like it would be the easiest way of making a multi-platform tool. I’ll also do a final writeup on my site in a couple of days.

There you have it! We may have a way to convert already previously owned (or downloaded) Playstation One games for use on the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play and have those games play smoother and with fewer bugs than using conventional emulators on Android. Once this is achieved, we can finally crown the Xperia Play the king of old school gaming on Android. We’ll be keeping you guys updated on the progress.

[Via Yifan.Lu]

Thanks, Nhialor!