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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.
This sig has been stolen. Return it to its original user for a reward.
No one's cracked the 1.50 or the 1.51 firmware yet, so US PSP owners are still SOL.
Has anyone ported a PIM (Personal Information Management) suite and user interface (like Opie) to it yet (or are there any projects in progress)? That would make the PSP attractive as a PDA as well.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Next step, GBA games.
That would seal the deal for me, and probably many others.
I think that it isn't outside of reason, its touted that the GBA is just as powerful as the SNES, so the hardware requirements apparently are close to being met....
Sony would be wise to open the machine up - it'll drive hardware sales certainly more than UMD movies will. Existing homebrew apps like PSPVideo 9 are probably driving more sales than software :).
www.lonseidman.com
...and I am sold. I'd love to lay in bed playing the Capcom classics on the PSP. I can do it now on the PC and modded Xbox, but the portable angle would be killer.
That's why I don't really get why platforms like Palm don't catch on more. With anybody being able to create and load programs on them, its suprising they don't get more attention. I think they could just as easily create all these emulators for Palm, and not have to worry about being sued. I realize that PSP has a better interface, but couldn't they make something like a keyboard attachment that has a game pad and 4 or 5 buttons?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Y'know there's nothing wrong with media-shifting games that you own. I've seen plenty of collections of old games lying around people's houses, if they own the game but want to play it on the train it's just a little more practical to use a ROM dump on a PSP than bring along a console, TV and bag of cartridges.
On the other side of the coin, if I wanted to play Sonic 3 on my PSP (since it's one of my favourite games) I'd be quite happy to pay a few £ on eBay for an original cartridge so I'm then completely legit in downloading a ROM of that cartridge and running it under emulation.
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."
Yes, but the Pocket PC video chipsets are pure arse compared. I have a HP3950 iPaq ( 400 mhz arm 64 ram ), and it cant run MAME or any other emulators worth a damn. I also have a PSP, and from what ive seen sofar, it will easily be capable of running most older emu's ( SNes, gameboy, earlier mame, etc... ). You really cant compare the two devices, they have different purposes. When it comes to graphics and sound, the PSP blows the PPC out of the water.
:)
But thats not the worst part. The controls for a Pocket PC are absolutely horrid for gaming! First off, the placement sucks... and secondly most units cant support multiple button presses concurrently.
In summary, when it comes to gaming you just cant compare the two devices. The PSP way out performs the PPC, but it damn well better, seeing as it was designed for gaming. That said, it rather sucks at reading Excel spreadsheets
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.
"already it boasts Full Speed Gameboy Colour Emulation"
But it only plays British games because the US releases are not in colour.
"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
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.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/28/ds_psp_sal es/
The DS has sold twice as many as the PSP has even shipped.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
P.
http://oceanclub.blogspot.com/
My Zaurus has been emulating other game devices for a couple years now. Declaring the PSP the *ultimate* emulation machine is a little far fetched.
The greatest experience we can have is the mysterious.
- Albert Einstein
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
Anyone who thinks the PSP is "the ultimate in handheld emulation consoles" clearly hasn't heard of the GP32.
Never mind emulating all those trashy modern toys, I want to know when I can run Sinclair Spectrum games on it!
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
When did it become wrong to pay for things? If there is something that I really enjoyed from previous generations, I will pay for it. This whole "everything digital has to be free" movement is sickening. It's this idea of entitlement. Nintendo's not just going to release old games for the hell of it. Suck it up and pay for good software.
http://www.bynarystudio.com
(admit it, with few exceptions every single PS2 game is really just one of about 10 games, but with different graphics and sounds).
and story, and controls, and gameplay...
8hop.com
This is the kind of thing I wish Sony would hear. They actually stand to profit from giving us what we want and opening up 1.5 to homebrew, via sales of memory cards and probably more systems, yet they don't!
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Tycho of Penny Arcade had a little rant the other day that I thought was quite succinct. Here's an excerpt:
How would I distinguish the PSP from full platforms? Let me count the ways:
* Full platforms can play any audio type, or allow applications to do so. . .
* Full platforms can play any type of video, or allow applications to do so, and these videos should be able to use the entire resolution of the screen. . .
* Executable code
I'm willing to bend on this one if you give me the other two. But letting people expand the functionality and value of your hardware isn't some imaginary thing. People write whole browsers and operating systems and every other Goddamn contraption, just because it's there. They'll make your product the kind of phenomenon you couldn't pay someone to create.
~ Aero