When the Playstation Classic launched, I couldn’t resist buying one (or later three!). I already owned numerous devices capable of playing Playstation games, but having something manufactured for the purpose was too good to miss.

After playing the 20 bundled games for a couple of weeks and becoming increasingly bored with the system, I turned to modding the Playstation Classic.

Besides adding more games and running games from other systems, modding the Playstation Classic allowed me to customize the user interface to my liking. There were already a handful of custom themes created by the modding community, but none felt right.

I decided that I liked the aesthetic of the original theme, but it could do with a bit more polish. Also, if I were to play retro games on a huge HD TV, I would need a user interface that didn’t look terrible.

I re-created most of the original theme’s icons and textual and background graphics. I did away with dithering and janky pixels.

Working within the original constraints of the user interface was challenging.

I created [some scripts to generate text-based images faster (in all locales) and used Photoshop to make everything else.

If you’ve got a Playstation Classic and you’ve modded it, you can grab the HD theme here: https://github.com/omgmog/psc-theme-hd