One thing I’ve overlooked since downgrading my PSP to firmware 1.5 was the fact that the Atari ST emulator CaSTaway would now be playable on my PSP. I wrote about wanting to get this emulator working on my PSP back when it was running firmware 2.6, but it was never ported over to that particular firmware version.

Having got a few spare minutes this weekend, I thought I’d have a go at getting it running on my PSP to see how well it works, and if the games are as good as I remember.

First, a little bit of history. I got an Atari ST 520FM for Christmas way back before PC’s really took off as gaming machines for the home. I can’t remember exactly what year, but I was probably around about 14, so lets say it was 1988. At that time, my gaming history revolved around assorted Sinclair Spectrums, so it was a big step up to the Atari ST and 16-bit gaming.

The Atari ST had some fantastic games on it, and I got hooked on the Microprose library of games, especially Geoff Cramond’s Grand Prix series, and the nicely polished miltary games that came packaged with wonderful manuals and fold out maps. along with cutout keyboard overlays.

So, getting this emulator running on my PSP almost brought a tear to my eye. The memories of the vivid green desktop and the two tone icons came flooding back. The emulator itself is easy to get running on a PSP with firmware 1.5, simply drop the two CaSTaway folders into the game directory along with one called atari_st, into which you place the ST bios (called TOS.ROM) and any games you want to play.

Having got a huge library of Atari ST games to choose from, I simply picked something that I thought would work well – Xenon II megablst. A simple vertical scrolling shoot-em-up, this game had a great sound track and some pretty slick graphics.

A quick browse of the web got me the software I need to convert the game disks into game images, and hey-presto, one Atari ST emulator running a classic Atari ST game.

Did it live upto expectations? Yes and no. As with all old gaming systems, some things have a rose tinted shade to them, and games that were fantastic at the time are perhaps not as good as you remember the first time around. However, I’m really impressed with this emulator, and I’ve got so many games I’d like to at least fire up once and have a play of, that I may still be using CaSTaway for the next few months.

You can get the Atari ST emulator CaSTaway from here : CaSTaway, and as always, google is your friend when it comes to finding a suitable BIOS. Note that I dumped out the BIOS of my own machine that is running the UK TOS 1.02 firmware. This works fine with CaSTaway.