If you’ve got an original PlayStation sitting in a box somewhere, there’s a good chance its laser is one reading session away from the big retro graveyard in the sky. Good news: the most trusted name in flash carts is coming to the rescue.
Hardware developer Igor Golubovskiy — better known to every retro collector on Earth as Krikzz — announced on October 15 that he’s building a plug-and-play optical drive emulator (ODE) for the original PlayStation. His post on X was brief: “I’m a little late to this party, but I’ll still come. PS1 plug and play ODE on it’s way.”
For the uninitiated: an ODE replaces the console’s CD-ROM drive entirely, feeding ISO or BIN/CUE images straight to the motherboard from solid-state storage at native speeds. No spinning discs, no laser assembly to die on you. And the phrase doing all the heavy lifting here is “plug and play” — according to Time Extension, Krikzz’s device will connect where the CD drive normally goes, won’t require any soldering, and is fully reversible.
That’s a bigger deal than it sounds. Installing the current gold-standard PS1 ODE, the xStation, means lifting microscopic pins on surface-mount chips across specific motherboard revisions like the PU-8 and PU-18 — nerve-wracking work plenty of owners outsource to professional modders. Earlier options weren’t much kinder: the PSIO used the parallel port but still demanded a soldered switchboard inside the shell. Solderless Pi Pico-powered alternatives like the ArcStation have only recently started proving you can bypass the CD-ROM assembly by plugging into the motherboard’s existing connectors.
It’s also a fascinating shift for Krikzz himself. He’s been the gold standard for running ROMs on original hardware since the late 2000s — Mega EverDrive, EverDrive-64, NES, Game Boy, you name it — but always through cartridge slots. The PlayStation has no cartridge slot to hijack (he did pull off Sega CD emulation through the Genesis cart bus with the Mega EverDrive Pro, mind you), so this is genuinely new territory.
The timing couldn’t be better. Sony launched the PlayStation in December 1994 in Japan, and those original drives are dying in droves — plastic sled rails warp, spindle motors fatigue, optical lenses degrade. Anyone who owned an early SCPH-1001 model in the ’90s probably remembers the trick of flipping the console upside down just to get Final Fantasy VII to read past the boot screen. An ODE fixes the problem permanently.
Krikzz has shown off a prototype plugged into a PSOne console — the USB-C cable visible at the top of the board is for development purposes only, so don’t start planning your cable management. No word yet on pricing, a release window, or which motherboard revisions will be supported; I’m especially curious whether it’ll work with the late-era PSone slim, which dropped the rear parallel port entirely.
I’ll say this: when Krikzz shows up late to a party, he usually brings the best gift. His track record says this one just works — and dying PS1 lasers can’t be replaced fast enough.
Sources: Time Extension — Krikzz announcement report (Oct 16, 2026); Pants Pants Revolution — EverDrive creator Krikzz ODE report (Oct 16, 2026); primary announcement via Krikzz on X (Oct 15, 2026).