Donkey Kong on the Sony PS1

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Donkey Kong Arcade Original
The Classic Arcade Original Donkey Kong

What a game concept. Giant woman-abducting ape runs amok on scaffolded building site with flaming oil drums. The health and safety rep would never allow this...

Also, the name.. "Donkey Kong". Was this a bad translation from the Japanese words for "Stupid Monkey" as some sources suggest? Or was it just an intentional bad choice.. I guess we can be thankful it didn't end up being called "Ass Monkey".

Anyway.. Focus man, Focus!

Question: Can I play Nintendo's arcade original Donkey Kong on the Sony PlayStation / PS1 / PSOne (and hence PSP, PS Vita, PS2, PS3 etc)?

Answer: Surprisingly, the answer is No.

Of course, by "Surprisingly" I mean "Unsurprisingly", and by "No" I mean "Yes.. Sort of".

Surprisingly / Unsurprisingly: Given the amount of old arcade originals that did rock up on the PSOne, this is one of the few old arcade classics that didn't.

For those not already in the know, The "Sony PlayStation" started off life as a peripheral CD-ROM plug in for the Super Famicom / Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). Sony also had a prototype stand-alone console that took SNES cartridges and CD Roms.

Sony Nintendo SNES CD
Sony Playstation CD ROM Peripheral For SNES
Sony Playstation Prototype
Sony Playstation Console Prototype with CD ROM and SNES Cartridge Slot

During the development cycle, Nintendo decided to drop its partnership with Sony and entered into a deal with Philips, and then ended up shelfing the idea anyway. Miffed Sony decided to continue development into a full games console, making Nintendo and Sony arch rivals in the gaming industry.

There is no official port of Donkey Kong on the PSOne. There is also no known unlockable / Easter egg of the game contained in any PSOne game. Who knows, maybe its there waiting to be discovered..

No / Yes.. Sort of: There are two options available to us and both of them rely on Homebrew:

MAME Logo

Option 1. PS1MAME: Yup, this is a port of MAME 0.34 for the PSOne. The version of MAME is old (1998) but still supports a lot of the old classic 8 bit arcade games.

That's the good news.. The bad news is that these older games can be expected to run (if at all) at somewhere around a quarter of their original speed. Well, erm, I did say "Sort Of"!

PS! IMBNES Cover

Option 2 - IMBNES: Not the original arcade version, but a very close port brought to you by the people who wrote the original game to play on hardware built by the people who built the original game hardware. You can't get much closer than that!

NES Donkey Kong Front Cover

NES Donkey Kong

NES Donkey Kong plays perfectly on IMBNES and IMBNES is one of the simplest emulators to set up for burning to CD as it comes with its own simple to use program that adds the NES roms that you want to play, and spits out a .cue and .bin ready to burn. The only additional requirement is a method of booting CDRs on your PS1 (Mod Chip, swap disc etc).


Unfortunately there is not much more to say. The options are limited but it is possible.

If you own a PS2, you may want to check out PS2 MAME as this plays arcade original Donkey Kong perfectly.

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