Dark Stone, Retroarch, and Steam.

I was looking for a game to keep me occupied during the long holiday weekend, and my partner handed me an old RPG from the original PlayStation days — Dark Stone. It didn’t run super well on my usual PSX emulator, so I was forced to try something different — RetroArch, now on Steam.

Dark Stone is an action RPG. A necromancer, Draak, has resurrected himself as a dragon and is terrorizing the world. Seven crystals scattered across seven dungeons in seven lands are required to reform the Time Stone and allow you to put a final end to him. You take on the role of one of eight different classes (male and female versions of warrior, mage, thief and priest), go out, explore, hunt, get levels and gear, and then take on a dungeon.

The quests for each land are drawn randomly from three, so each playthrough will be somewhat different. I started the game several times while I was trying to get RetroArch play and then rip the game, and each time the first dungeon told a different story.

There is a PC Dark Stone version with better graphics and, from what I understand, the ability to make a second, computer controlled character to help you out. The PlayStation version just has the original 1990s flavor graphics and the single PC you control.

RetroArch is an emulator front end. By itself it can do little, but it supports a huge variety of cores, which are emulators for specific machines. Many (or maybe all) of the emulator cores are available from the original developers in standalone versions, and if you’re only playing emulated games from one specific machine, maybe that’s all you’ll need.

Me, I have boxes full of Atari, ColecoVision, SNES, Saturn, Dreamcast, PSX, PS2, PS3 and GameBoy games. I want them all to be playable and at my fingertips. My Windows hotbar is full of emulators. Bringing them all together in one spot is probably a really good idea.

I’ve known about RetroArch for awhile, and even tried to get the standalone version working at one point. I just couldn’t figure it out. When I saw it on Steam, though, I thought I would give it a final try — and it more or less worked.

Getting PlayStation games working required three ripped BIOSes, different than the one I already had. I do have a working PS2, so though I didn’t get the BIOS from my PS2, I feel I’m morally okay on this. Even though most of the time, I find the ROMs on warez sites, I almost always have a physical copy of the game available.

In the case of Dark Stone, RetroArch offered to rip it to the hard drive, so even the digital copy I am playing came straight from a disk I have right next to me.

Atari 2600, Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 games worked smoothly right out of the box. The one Saturn game I tried (Magic Knight Rayearth) didn’t load at all, though I’d previously gotten it to play with a standalone Saturn emulator. PSX games worked fine, once I obtained the correct BIOS files. RetroArch supports the PCSX2 emulator for PlayStation 2 games, but it doesn’t seem to be part of the vanilla Steam release. I may try to get that in later.

So in short, if you like a lot of retro games and you don’t have the original systems or would just rather not go through the trouble of hooking them up, maybe give RetroArch a shot.

And, if you want a PSX RPG with a lot of replayability and some fun hacking and slashing, give Dark Stone a shot. I have some play sessions up on my Twitch channel.