Switch 2 suddenly has a better PS1 emulator than the one PS5's had for years, as the new Console Archives series shows Sony how retro games should be

The long-running Arcade Archives series from Japanese publisher Hamster has set an impressive standard for emulated rereleases of older games, and its new Console Archives lineup is already showing similarly high standards. The fact that it's debuting with classic extreme sports game Cool Boarders also comes with a special irony: there's now a PS1 emulator on Switch 2 that's dramatically better than Sony's official emulator on PS5.

Hamster's version of Cool Boarders is available now on Switch 2 for $12, and is also set to come to PS5 next week. It's not a remaster or any other sort of upgrade – this is simply a PS1 game packaged up in an emulator. But it's a good emulator, and as demonstrated in the comparison video from GVG below, it's a dramatically better one than the official PS1 emulator on PS5.

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With existing PS1 games for PS5, including Cool Boarders, the games are rendered at a much higher native resolution. You might think it's a good thing for these games to be made sharper than their native 240p, but blowing them up to higher res exposes all the flaws in the polygonal models, revealing all the seams and other issues that are mostly invisible at the original resolution. On top of that, this emulator doesn't even bother to correct the dithering issues that appear on 2D sprites and backgrounds when PS1 games are shown on modern displays.

The Console Archives version takes the opposite approach. Now, Cool Boarders is rendered in its actual, native resolution, preserving the original look and feel. The emulator also corrects the dithering issue. In one case it's leaving the game alone, and in another it's fixing an issue, but both decisions result in an emulated version that looks much closer to how the original would've appeared back in the '90s.

But hey, maybe your eyes have been trained to prefer the spartan look of ultra-sharp polygons. There are still other flaws with Sony's PS1 emulator. Notably, there's poor performance, with wildly variable frame pacing throughout gameplay. That makes the game feel much more juddery and inconsistent to play, but the issue has been fully corrected in the Hamster version.

Working on another comparison my fellas, I can't overstate

— @jon.gvg.io (@jon.gvg.io.bsky.social) 2026-02-06T16:43:21.018Z

Perhaps the most notable flaw with the official emulator is its selection of CRT filters, which are universally poor implementations that simply blur the image and overlay some pattern that doesn't even look like an old TV screen. Hamster's emulator has much better CRT filters which actually conform to the game's pixel grid, just as real scanlines would on an actual CRT TV.

The existing version of Cool Boarders is a fine enough way to play it if you don't have an eye for retro detail, but the Console Archives release is an additional layer of proof that we can – and should – expect better from modern versions of retro games. Even if it's "just" emulation in both cases, it's a shame to see Sony's official option dropping the ball so hard. Here's hoping Hamster's releases grow to cover a wide swathe of the PS1 library in the years to come.

Here's hoping more of the best PS1 games out there get better treatment in the future.