Retropie won't run PS1 .pbp games bought from the PlayStation Network

[pedrovay2003]

I'm running Retropie on a Raspberry Pi 4 B, and everything seems to be working great, except for running my PS1 games. All of the PS1 games that I have I purchased directly from the PlayStation Network on my PSP, and then transferred to my computer and then to the Retropie machine from there. I have the PS1 BIOS in the correct folder on the Retropie, scph5501.bin, dumped from my own PlayStation Classic mini console. I know that these games and the BIOS work, because if I try to run them on the PC, I can play them without a problem.

On the PC, I play all my games through Retroarch, and the PS1 core that I use is Beetle-PSX. I understand, however, that the Beetle emulator is not available for Retropie, because it doesn't like the Raspberry Pi's hardware. lr-pcsx_rearmed says that it supports . pbp files, but none of the ones that I've bought from the PlayStation Network function. They all just immediately quit back out to the game list. Is there any way that I can get these games to run on the Retropie? Everything else that I've tried to do with the system works flawlessly. This is the only problem I'm having. Thanks in advance.

[dankcushions]

@pedrovay2003 please fill out https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first including verbose log.

[lostless]

@pedrovay2003 .PBP files from the PSN store are encrypted with DRM. It’s so you can’t do what you are trying to do by playing them anywhere and are locked to your psn account. Now there are tools that do decrypt and export to a iso or a non encrypted pbp file. Just Google.
What I do (or use to do) is take my own ps1 cds and use tools to convert to .pbp to play on my modded psp. Just so happens these files also play on some emulators.

[pedrovay2003]

@lostless Huh, that's really interesting to me. The unmodified .pbp PS1 games from the PlayStation network run fine in Retroarch on the PC, so I was surprised that they didn't work on Retropie. Can Retroarch really run those games even considering DRM?

[pjmcphizzle]

@pedrovay2003 I had the same issues with my purchased games, I had to download functionally identical copies of all my games.

Maybe the reason they work for you on PC is that you're using a different core, such as Duckstation or BeetlePSX.

[lostless]

@pedrovay2003 I can’t really test it, cause I’ve never actually bought a ps1 game on psn. But unless an emulator has the keys to unlock the file, it should not work. Maybe one of the emulators has a key, no idea.

[pedrovay2003]

@pjmcphizzle said in Retropie won't run PS1 .pbp games bought from the PlayStation Network:

@pedrovay2003 I had the same issues with my purchased games, I had to download functionally identical copies of all my games.

Maybe the reason they work for you on PC is that you're using a different core, such as Duckstation or BeetlePSX.

@lostless said in Retropie won't run PS1 .pbp games bought from the PlayStation Network:

@pedrovay2003 I can’t really test it, cause I’ve never actually bought a ps1 game on psn. But unless an emulator has the keys to unlock the file, it should not work. Maybe one of the emulators has a key, no idea.

Yeah, I'm using the Beetle PSX core. I hear that Mednafen runs them, too. I don't know if there's a keys file built into them (I can't find any evidence of that at all in Beetle PSX), but I guess I'm glad it works on the PC, at least; I hadn't bought more than one PSN PSOne Classic up until recently, when I found out I could run them after legally buying them.

[lostless]

@pedrovay2003 well the keys were leaked many years ago. Possible that they are in there. Or they have some hackey way of decrypting like the programs that will extract a clean iso from a bought pbp.
You may be the one of the very few people to attempt to run a DRMed file in an emulator, because for the most part, it should not work.
Also beetle-psx is practically the same emulator as mendafins.