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PSP Emulation Madness
An anonymous reader writes "The PSP is now the ultimate in handheld emulation consoles, already it boasts Full Speed Gameboy Colour Emulation and improving Snes & Master System but added today it also has NeoGeo CD and Sega Genesis emulators added to the impressive list of homebrew releases."
... but so far it only works on the Japanese 1.00 firmware. So far there's no support for the US versions (1.5 and 1.51) so for most of us, it's nothing to get too excited about... yet. I don't know about you, but I don't want to flash my PSP's firmware... but I'm getting so impatient. Just imagine... a 1GB card of all of your favorite games for all of those classic systems, portable, on that gorgeous screen. I hope they hurry up and figure out how to run homebrew apps on the latest firmware.
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Don't know if the software has been ported or not, but the PSP wouldn't really be a very attractive PDA option, since it has no touch screen.
Set the bar high, then bring a tall ladder.
I assume you mean Moore's law. If you do then you are barking up the wrong tree:
"Moore's law is the empirical observation that at our rate of technological development, the complexity of an integrated circuit, with respect to minimum component cost will double in about 24 months." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
Nintendo hardly dropped the ball on the DS.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Its not the hardware sales that they make profit on, or at least hardware of the console itself. They make profit on 1) The games/software sales, 2) accessories. The "licencing fee" to write software, or create an accessory, is what makes it a workable business model while selling the main unit at cost or even with a loss.
So they really have no incentive to "open up" the platform.
They left out NES, TG16 / PC Engine, and the fact that so far, it's only 1.0. They also didn't mention that there's an up and coming emulator called PSPE that can run PSP some homebrew on your PC. No, it can't run PSP games... but it's interesting for devs and just playing around in general, and rather nice to have this early on.
As much as I support PSP homebrew and emulation, it's premature to say it's "the ultimate in handheld emulation consoles". Many of these emus work at good speed, and many have sound, but it's still very early in the game. This is just ASKING for flames from the DS and GBA fans, not to mention the POCKET PC which can play everything from the Atari, NES, SNES, TG16, Amiga, C64, and etc including SONY PLAYSTATION.
As for when us 1.5 folks will see homebrew... "soon", if you believe the rumors Several teams are hard at work on it, and the team Dynarox recently announced "In a really near future, a loader will be released to make games work via the memory card.", so far, no reason has been given to disbelieve them. This loader will probably be in the form of a bios replacement.
And to answer all the silly questions that are bound to pop up: No, you can't do anything right now. No, you can't downgrade your firmware by any currently known methods. And yes, odds are that "backups" and "emulation" will go hand and hand when this is finally cracked. -- No, this did not kill the Dreamcast, and No, it won't kill the PSP either. -- Proof: It's easy as heck to convert video from your DVDs to MP4 and store on a memory card, but UMD Videos are already a commerical success.
"They" do release emulators for the Palm and PocketPC platforms. Example: http://paqpark.nuclearfallout.net/projects/pockets nes.php
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Currently, you can run unsigned code on any DS (reguardless of region or firmware version) with a small piece of hardware that inserts into the DS card slot and a GBA flash cart. You can even run the DS Downloadable demos (like they had at the kiosks at E3) with only a combatible wifi card for your PC. If you want a homebrew-able machine, buy a DS.
I haven't played many of my commercial DS games in a while, but I play homebrew or E3 demos almost every day still.
PS: I really hope they release an English version of Trauma Center. Or maybe I'll just learn Japanese...
Either I live in a topsy turvey town or most market research is wrong.
PSP has outsold DS by a LONG-SHOT at my store since it came out.
XBoX has outsold PS2 by a LONG-SHOT at my store since we opened.
There are whole days where not a single game from the GameCube section leaves the floor.
There are whole weeks where not a single person touches the DS section.
But I must tell you, we get TONS of people shopping the PSP section.
It got so bad that we simply took our DS marketing off the wall and put it in a small display rack like how we display the GBA games. It's nothing impressive. The PSP takes up about as much store space as our GameCube section now.
A warning for anyone thinking of grabbing homebrew without reading up on it.
:(
Unfortunately the flash ROM on the PSP is completely writable by anything running on the machine. The 1.50 and 1.51 updates fix this, but in doing so locking out homebrew software. For anyone that can't see the connection - malicious writes to flash = a shiny PSP paperweight.
http://forums.ps2dev.org/viewtopic.php?t=1962 [ps2dev.org]
So, if you're going to run homebrew on your PSP, beware the possible consequences. Mine just arrived yesterday, I wish they'd release these things sooner in the EU! Alas, it's 1.50