Relive the PlayStation Memory Card experience right on your desktop

Ayyy, I made another thing! And unlike other projects I did not torture myself over this one for too long and within a day’s time I had pretty much wrapped up these neat PlayStation BIOS inspired wallpapers. I just couldn’t get over how clean this dump of the original PlayStation menu assets looked and had to make something with them. Thanks Skyevlyn for pointing them out!

In the process I discovered that there were several BIOS updates to the original PlayStation over the years and these graphics changed slightly with different patterns and gradients from one to the next. It also appears that they changed by region too. Knowing that there wasn’t some canonically perfect representation that I could easily recreate I just kinda tweaked things until I felt good about it.

There’s a bit of added drop shadowing to help things pop out a bit more and obviously these aren’t in original 4:3 aspect ratio. I spread things out a little bit to fill the 1080p resolution. Here’s a quick rundown of the different images and variations included:

• ‘Just the BG’ and ‘Just the BG (Alt)’
  It’s just that big purple/blue sphere that sits behind the menu items. The ‘Alt’ version has a couple extra spheres from the Main Menu spread around in case you like to see more geometric shapes on your desktop
  
• Main Menu ‘Full’ and ‘Lite’
  As seen after that legendary boot-up, it’s the Main Menu of the PlayStation! The menu items and sphere placement are pretty authentic to the original layout but the overall spacing is wider. The ‘Lite’ version just omits the ‘MAIN MENU’ box on the right side in case that bothers you
  
• Memory Card ‘Full’ and ‘Lite’
  Many an hour was spent on this screen making the gut-wrenching calls about what save files to delete because buying more memory cards was expensive! The arrangement is pretty faithful with just some extra space afforded between the columns. The ‘Lite’ version omits the column down the center in case you think it looks too garish, gaudy, or you just need the space for more icons

Hope ya like it and let me know if you find a use for them. On a related note, I had dreams back in 2023 of compiling every PlayStation memory card icon but discovered that it’s still quite a demanding and manual task. A few awesome folks have made contributions to those ends however, and their work is pretty easy to adapt into Windows .ICO files that fit nicely on my wallpapers. Check out VGCartography‘s excellent spread of memory card icons and NatSpectrum‘s cleaned-up PNG versions that are ready to download in ICO format. 

This whole thing has inspired me to get back on the memory card icon project so I might actually start making progress on that soon. It’ll be fun to play with for a couple of days at least.