How to Play Dino Crisis on iPhone

In 1999 Capcom took the survival horror of Resident Evil to an island full of dinosaurs. Regina, an agent of the special forces team S.O.R.T., lands on Ibis Island with her squad to bring back Dr. Kirk, a scientist working at the island’s research facility. They find the base overrun by raptors, and the raptors are not the biggest thing on the island. If you own the game, Nagori lets you play it on iPhone and iPad.

What you need

• An iPhone or iPad with iOS 17.6 or later.
• Nagori from the App Store. Your first game is free.
• A disc image of your copy of Dino Crisis: .chd, .cue + .bin, .pbp, .iso or .img, or a .zip or .rar containing it. The game fits on a single disc.

No BIOS file is needed.

How to play Dino Crisis on iPhone

1. Install Nagori from the App Store.
2. Copy your Dino Crisis disc image to the Files app, in iCloud Drive or On My iPhone.
3. Open Nagori, tap + and select the file. For a .cue image, select the .cue together with all of its .bin files, or add the archive they came in.
4. Find Dino Crisis on the PS1 shelf with its box art and press Play.

Controls

Dino Crisis uses the tank controls of Resident Evil: up walks Regina forward, down steps back, and left and right turn her on the spot. You hold a shoulder button to raise your weapon and press the action button to fire. The Standard touch layout has the D-pad, the face buttons and the shoulder buttons.

Raptors close the distance fast, so you need to find the aim button without looking. Pause, open Edit Layout, make the shoulder buttons bigger, and drag the one you aim with down from the top corner to sit beside the face buttons.

With a controller, every button sits where it did on the PlayStation pad, and the left stick works as the D-pad too. Press the left stick to open the pause menu.

Saves

Dino Crisis has no typewriters and no ink ribbons. Instead, the game offers to save at certain doors as you move from one area to the next, so a death can still send you back a long way. A door is not always an escape either: raptors can follow Regina into the next room. Nagori takes the pressure off:

• Save states. Pause and choose Save before you open a door you’re unsure about, or with a dinosaur close behind. If it goes wrong, Load and try again. Nagori keeps your last four saves per game.
• Quit any time. Leave in the middle of a corridor and Continue puts you back exactly where you were.
• The memory card still works. Saves the game offers go to the game’s own memory card, as on the console.

Gail or Rick: two ways through

At several points Regina’s teammates disagree about what to do next. Gail, the squad leader, wants to push ahead after Kirk, while Rick prefers a more careful plan. You choose whose plan to follow, and the choice changes the route you take, the scenes you see and which ending you get.

Make a save state just before each choice, and you can play one path, then Load and take the other. Nagori keeps only your last four save states, though. If you want to come back to a branch much later, also keep the game’s own save from the last save point before it: the memory card holds several saves.

Best settings

Unlike the first Resident Evil games, Dino Crisis draws its rooms in real-time 3D instead of pre-rendered pictures, and some camera angles pan to follow Regina. So Nagori’s picture settings affect the whole scene, not only the characters.

• Quality: High, the default, renders the rooms, Regina and the dinosaurs at twice the original resolution.
• Precise Geometry, in Advanced Settings, steadies the slight wobble of PS1 polygons, which shows on walls and floors as the camera moves.
• Quality: Low keeps the original resolution with raw pixels, if you want the rougher look of the original.
• Screen Effects → CRT Screen adds scanlines if you want the game to look like it did on a 1990s TV.