PSP Emulator For Android Released 89
YokimaSun writes "This may be one of those projects that will get trounced on soon enough like the great Bleemcast Project, but a group of developers calling themselves the PPSSPP Project have released the first PSP Emulator for the Android OS, the emulator lets you play PSP Games with a touchscreen which was something PSP owners had wanted for years. At the moment games that are playable are Puzzle Bobble Deluxe, Puyo Pop Fever & Pinball Fantasies. The emulator has also been released for Windows and BlackBerry."
"Trounced on"? I don't think so. (Score:4, Interesting)
First of all, the verb "trounce" is never used with the preposition "on". But I'm a Finn, so what do I know?
That said: Android allows side-loading. Just put the emulator on Torrent (where you can find a shit-ton of other Android apps) and Sony can do fuckall about it.
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What do you know? More about grammar than the Slashdot editors, for one. Regardless of your native language, I think you're correct about this point.
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It's perfectly valid English (native speaker of the Queen's English here).
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What flavor of Finn? Huckleberry?
Sorry, couldn't resist.
On an unrelated note, "fuck all [wiktionary.org]" is two words.
Uh-huh (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never heard anyone want this. Is this anything like all the people who wanted a non-UMD version of the PSP, and eventually got it in the PSPgo, which promptly fell flat on its face [pcworld.com] due to lack of actual interest?
Of course, I can always imagine an emulator being popular, if it plays copies of games (regardless of whether you consider this OK or not).
Re:Uh-huh (Score:4, Insightful)
The only additional control mechanism PSP users want is a second analog thumb stick. And maybe another set of shoulder buttons for PSX games.
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well.. there's some android devices with gamepads, like xperia play(dunno if it has the horse power to run this though).
the list of runnable games isn't that big though right now it seems.
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I have an iControlpad [icontrolpad.com] and games are very playable. Also works with most other emulators, so you can play snes, arcade, psx and n64 games for instance.
Who else would actually buy an iControlPad? (Score:2)
I have an iControlpad
But how many other people are willing to buy and carry an iControlPad just to play emulated games on a phone when they could just buy and carry a used PSP? Has the manufacturer released any sort of numbers so that developers can know what size of market to expect for games optimized for the iControlPad?
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Games don't need to be optimised for iControlpad: you can map the keypresses from the pad to a virtual keyboard using free software. Plus, most people already carry their phone everywhere anyway, so the extra iControlpad is no bigger hassle than the extra PSP. The pad is about the samesize as a regular smartphone. For me it's as convenient as can be. I'd still be interested in seeing numbers though.
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Games don't need to be optimised for iControlpad: you can map the keypresses from the pad to a virtual keyboard using free software.
Games still need to be optimized for the virtual keyboard, as opposed to exclusive reliance on an on-screen gamepad. And they also need to be ported from the PC in the first place, which developers are unlikely to do if they don't think a lot of people will be buying and carrying external Bluetooth gamepads.
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I couldn't agree more, but you can get around this with a bluetooth joypad. (ex. Bluetooth Wii Classic Controller from Datel).
Of course if you're committed to carrying around an extra piece of hardware anyway just hacking an old PSP probably makes more sense. It's quite capable of emulating many 'legacy' consoles.
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Is this anything like all the people who wanted a non-UMD version of the PSP, and eventually got it in the PSPgo, which promptly fell flat on its face due to lack of actual interest?
Isn't that like saying people don't actually want a fuel-efficient vehicle because no one was buying one particular vehicle because of all its other flaws. I can only speak for myself, but while the PSPgo is a non-UMD PSP, the design of it makes it uncomfortable to play PSP games. Plus, I think it'd be more accurate to say that people wanted a PSP where the limitations/flaws of UMDs did not impact using the PSP, which does not necessarily translate into "remove the UMD bay". Thankfully, there is custom f
Re:Yeah right (Score:4, Informative)
Uh. The PSP is -NOTHING- like the PS3. It's actually also lower spec than the PS2. It's more like a PS1.5.
Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Informative)
Utterly irrelevant. A PS2 uses an unusual proprietary architecture [wikipedia.org] and games tend to take advantage of very low-level architecture-specific tweaks. A PSP is a pretty standard MIPS R4000 and a fairly crappy but fairly standard GPU. With high-level emulation [wikipedia.org], dyamic recompilation [wikipedia.org], etc, it shouldn't be hard to emulate even on modest hardware. With today's GHz+ CPUs in phones, brute forcing may even be a reasonable option.
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This reminds me of the work some enthusiasts have done with old games. Due to fundamental changes in the way shaders are done by GPUs, Theif 1 and 2 look like a green mess of hot garbage if you try to play it on a modern comp. I dont know how it works, but someone made a little hack that feeds the shading requirements to the CPU instead of GPU and it works great. It allowed me to re-enjoy those great games again, and I applaud the work they put into it.
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Can't look it up while at work, but if I recall it was a fundamental shift away from how graphics cards were made at the time. Theif came out back when Voodoos were still the shiznit, and we've come a long way since then.
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Virtual Machines ftw.
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That's because the PS2 has a rather complicated graphics subsystem, which is the hard part to emulate. All of the options you can tweak in PCSX2 are because of this.
But the PSP is more like a souped-up original Playstation, with 10x CPU speed, 16x RAM, 100x GPU speed, and an MPEG-4 decoder. I'm going to guess that the GPU is more like modern GPUs than the PS2 was, which would mean that the GPU in the host Android device can be used to do the 3D stuff. This would be like how N64 emulators can use the host's
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Another thing to consider is this: Yes, PCSX2 requires a beast of a CPU, but it will only use 2 cores. That's all it was coded for. Unfortunately, when CPUs started expanding by adding cores instead of upping mips, the emulator didn't benefit from it. A 3.2GhZ 8-core is pretty much 3.2GhZ dual-core as far as PCSX2 is concerned.
Sadly, coupled with the fact that most of the game-specific optimizations are for the popular crap I don't want to play (Final Fantasy Whatever, etc...) it never reached its full pot
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For a while, it has profited directly from having a third one, as these days, the VU can run on its own thread, so it's one for GS, one for the VU and one for EE.
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Cool, I wasn't aware of that. Apparently my information is dated. I'm not sure how much it will help me personally, since the EE was always my bottleneck, but I'll have to grab a newer version and try it now that GW2 is getting stale(r).
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I'm afraid you don't know the definition of the word emulate. Once you do, you will realize that you made and extremely foolish statement. Any Turing complete software system can emulate any other implementation.
Turing complete neither necessary nor sufficient (Score:3)
Any Turing complete software system can emulate any other implementation.
For one thing, Turing completeness is unachievable because the memory of the universe is not unbounded. (Did you mean LBA completeness, which is the same thing minus the unbounded tape?) For another, Turing completeness or LBA completeness is not sufficient for gaming applications, which has soft real-time requirements.
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That would be one reason they chose to emulate a PSP rather than a PS2 or PS3.
This is gonna be sweet! (Score:2)
What?
Oh, I have an iPhone. I'll never get to experience this.
Never mind then. Thanks, Steve.
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You knew what you were buying into.
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Oh, I have an iPhone. I'll never get to experience this.
Sure you will. Man up and buy a real smartphone.
They're cheaper than the iPhone, so why didn't you just buy a real phone to begin with?
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Put an Android emulator on your iPhone, and you'll be good to go.
Bleem was awesome (Score:2)
I bought multiple copies to support Bleem years ago.
Clean room reverse engineering is a consumer rights issue. It should be supported when someone has the cojones to stand up to a large, litigious company.
Reverse engineering, format shifting (Score:1)
A right to reverse consumer electronic devices (including game consoles) should be codified in law, IMHO. Right along the lines of format shifting, skipping adds in TV recordings, etc.
Especially if you realize that most emulator users are folks that a) already own the emulated device, or b) wouldn't buy it anyway. And it takes time to develop a decent emulator, so it won't be useful until a device has been on the market for some time. So it's not like the company would lose lots of sales because emulator
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Yup. Unfortunate that they had to give up the fight not because they were losing in court, but because they didn't have the funds to continue.
Source: I was a bleem! Beta tester, one of the bleem.com forum administrators, and was part of their E3 booth in 2000.
The coder Randy Linden was all about the fact that it was a 'clean room' reverse engineering project that didnt require the PSX BIOS. Also as far as I know they were the first to figure out how to get the Dreamcast to boot a CDR as if it were a legit d
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Yeah, nothing really to give away. There was literally only enough copies of the beta bleemcast for the Dreamcast's on hand (and I think maybe one emergency backup), and the PSX to DC controller adapters were prototypes.
It was all VERY beta at the time.
Author here (Score:5, Informative)
This is a bit too early for a slashdot post in my opinion. The emulator was just open sourced and it plays only a few games, not very well.
However, like it happened with Dolphin ( http://www.dolphin-emu.org/ [dolphin-emu.org] ), I'm sure that compatibility will grow as quickly as we gain contributors. Here are the real links:
http://www.ppsspp.org/ [ppsspp.org] and http://www.github.com/hrydgard/ppsspp [github.com] .
Thanks!
Henrik
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Looks like a decent start to me. I'm going to want better controls, obviously, as the SDL build seemed to think the world is a crappy touchscreen. I tried Disgaea (backup of my own disc), but it got stuck at the loading screen; not really sure what it was waiting for. I did rather expect the unimplemented functions it warned of, Atrac+ doesn't seem that popular - but it's used extensively by this game, which was what I bought the PSP for in the first place.
When building, the inline assembly for CPUID didn't
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Yeah that inline asm doesn't seem to work on 32-bit linux. Feel free to send a pull request with your replacement code :)
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A book.
Why do we need to buy our children $300 mobile game systems to sate them? Are they that mindless, and their parents so careless, that they need to be electronically entertained and stimulated every waking minute of the day?
[/oldmanrant]
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[/sarcasm]
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No paper cuts either.
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Hey, let's use this opportunity to share some facts person that's obviously jealous of this news for Android.
Not only do Android users have access to pretty much all of the same smudge-screen derived free-to-play social vomit that's been so popular on devices like the iPad, we also have access to pretty much every emulator available; and they can be purchased or downloaded freely -- even from Google's market; which is just one of many places to shop.
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[Android device owners with a USB OTG adapter] can plug in actual gamepads, keyboards, mice, whatever; and yes, there's also Bluetooh
But how many people, other than you and toutankh [slashdot.org], have actually bought a USB or Bluetooth gamepad to carry with your phone or tablet?
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Yeah, some Android devices need an adapter, others do not. Many devices ship with micro USB and some even have full size USB. What really matters though -- especially for me, is that USB is a supported "OPTION" that's available on Android. It's why if I want, I can plug an arcade stick into my phone or any of my tablets -- well, not my iPad.
And I really can't give y
Gamepad popularity affects selection of games (Score:2)
Hey thanks for quoting my sentence, but then modifying it with a "partial" truth that only goes to show what you don't know.
Thank you for the correction. Next time could you please use a bit less sarcasm though?
It's why if I want, I can plug an arcade stick into my phone or any of my tablets -- well, not my iPad.
True. I just want to know how many people "want", as I'll explain next.
And I really can't give you an answer to your presumptuous question, nor do I care, as its outcome does not effect my choices
It costs a developer time=money to port a game optimized for arcade sticks to Android, and developers won't do it if they think there's not big enough of an audience. If few people own arcade sticks and are willing to plug them into an Android device, then few developers will find the audience large enough to make it worth their while to make such a po
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But I don't always bring it with me. Only for lenghty away missions.
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Being free or for sale is irrelevant. Sony can go after them just as hard if they choose.
And for what it's worth, bleem! was a clean room reverse engineering, and used no Sony code whatsoever (no PSX BIOS, etc.).
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Making money is kind of the point of a company, which they were.
And to be fair, in every court appearance they 'won' and helped set some legal precedence in regard to emulation. In the end, they did just run out of money. bleem! wasn't out to screw Sony over or promote piracy, which is why it didn't support loading of .ISO's. the idea was to make sure the original PSX disc was used.
I have - Xperia Play and i 3 it (Score:1)
Lumines : PSP :: Rebirth : Android (Score:1)
Check out Rebirth on the Android! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.plusonelabs.rebirth [google.com]
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Wanted for years on a touchscreen? (Score:1)
Cant say Id ever heard anyone say they wanted psp games on a touch screen. Especially considering the psp has a circle pad, 4d pad, 4 face buttons, 2 shoulder buttons, start and select buttons I cant imagine thats going to work real well on a touchscreen.
Great (Score:1)
Not "for android" but portable (Score:2)
OP title is very misleading. This is a new PSP emulator that has been written from scratch in c++ with portability in mind, so it's not locked to x86. It doesn't have to be run for Android, nor is it made with Android as the main target. It also failed to link to the project's website at http://www.ppsspp.org/ [ppsspp.org].
Previous leading PSP emulator is written in java: http://jpcsp.org/ [jpcsp.org]
A C++ conversion of it was attempted at some point but it never gained steam. PPSSPP might, as it was founded by people who've made s