PSP Oculus Rift Emulator Puts Players Inside of Virtual Reality PSP Games (roadtovr.com)

An anonymous reader writes: PPSSPP VR is an emulator that specifically adapts PSP games for use in the Oculus Rift VR headset. Going beyond merely showing a large screen view of the game in a virtual environment, PPSSPP actually puts you inside of the game with a full field of view, just like made-for-VR titles, including headtracking and true stereoscopic 3D. The emulator comes from the same author as Dolphin VR, the Wii & Gamecube emulator with VR support.

Comments

Players in the Game

[MountainLogic]

Wow, really in the Game? Just like Fantastic Voyage?

Re:Players in the Game

[TheRealMindChild]

slide slide slippity slide

Re:Players in the Game

[mccalli]

Sadly, Racquel Welsh is not included.

Obligatory Futurama

[R3d M3rcury]

When I read the "Puts Players Inside of Virtual Reality PSP Games," it made me think of Virtual Virtual Skeeball.

How?

[manu0601]

I understand they added 3D rendering to titles that did not have it, without modifying original code. How did they do that?

Re:How?

[safetyinnumbers]

I'd guess that if the emulator intercepts the system's rendering calls it would have access to everything needed (textures, models, etc) to render a scene from any viewpoint. It could then combine the game's camera with two separate eye viewpoints to render two images for the stereoscopic scene (or even ignore the game's camera position entirely).

This would not work well if the game optimizes the scene before rendering, by removing or not animating anything out-of-view for its intended camera.

Think of the possibilities...

[Type44Q]

Put me inside Battle Arena: Toshinden... I'll show that KGB blonde what's what. ;)

Re:Upstram

[gl4ss]

probably to avoid long talk times with the maintainers, if the original project even has maintainers.. emulators tend to be like that.

Vomit-inducing?

[RogueyWon]

Isn't this going to be incredibly nausea-inducing to use? My understanding of what's needed for a "pleasant" VR experience in terms of resolution, image quality and framerate does not align with my experience of most PSP games.

Now sure, you can use emulation to upscale the resolution and - in some cases - increase the framerate. But that's not going to get around boarder issues with PSP games in general.

First of all, a good number of PSP games tied the game's logic to framerate (Square-Enix games in particular), so unlocking framerates via emulation can cause some very odd effects. If you've tried the PC version of the first Dark Souls with a third party mod to remove the 30fps cap, you'll have seen something similar (animations becoming de-synchronised from actions and so on).

Second, a lot of PSP 3d games had very short draw distances and used heavy fogging and blur effects to disguise this. That's not too bad on a small screen, but it starts to look fairly unpleasant if you output the video to a monitor or TV, let alone a VR headset

And finally, the fact that the PSP only had a single analogue stick means that in many 3d games, camera controls were put either on the face or shoulder buttons. These are digital, not analogue inputs, so there is basically only one speed at which the player can rotate the camera. Take a look at the home-console versions of Final Fantasy Type-0 (which are ports of a PSP game with higher resolution art assets but few other changes) if you want to see how jarring this is even on a television and twin-stick controller. That's going to be seriously unpleasant in VR.

Old School

[osswmi]

Time to break out the Ratchet and Clank games again! :D

I only want one thing from VR

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball VR.