[PMS] Failures in PSP emulation

In the course of recent revisiting of different consoles of old, summarized by your truly in PSP eMulation Series (PMS), I have encountered a lot of problems. Some emulators are not very easy to configure and get running, but that is a minor thing – if you’re smart enough to hack your PSP and use Google, you will solve all the quirks on the road to emulation. The real problem lies elsewhere – in the firmware compatibility.

My PSP has the latest custom firmware by Dark Alex, namely 5.ooM33-6. The bad thing about it is that there exists a lot of homebrew that would run on my PSP at some point in the past, but won’t anymore. I already got used to the fact that there are problems with homebrew programs written for 1.50 firmware – even though I had 1.50 firmware extension, which theoretically makes 5.00M33 firmware fully backwards compatible, a number of programs would not run. Period. These include R-Gear, Snakes and other programs I really liked, so it really hurt me.

Unfortunately, that is not all. Many programs that would run under 3.xx firmware refuse to run under 5.00M33. In this group the vast majority are the emulators. Below is a list of four emulators that I used in the past but can’t use now:

• DGen – Sega Genesis
• CPS1PSP and CPS2PSP – CPS System 1 and 2
• MVSPSP – NeoGeo
• Castaway – Atari ST

Trust me – I have googled, I have tried different versions, I have put a lot of effort into running those, but I failed. Perhaps my PSP Phat is already too old, perhaps there is something wrong with it, or perhaps I am not competent enough to run it, I don’t know. What I know, however, is that I had a wide selection of homebrew that I liked and this selection has narrowed over the course of the last year or two, without me even noticing it. This is a huge disappointment, really.

[PMS] PSPDOSBox – DOS emulation on PSP (duh)

When I was a kid, we needed an ugly, bulky PC to be able to play our simple games. I still remember the gray tower of an early AT on which I played modified version of the classic Digger (it was not a very politically correct version, substituting names of monsters with names of communist officials of the period).

Nowadays all we need is a PSP.

The development of technology doesn’t cease to amaze me. I was quite shocked that PSP could handle GTA in its full three-dimensional glory, but it was programmed by a team of experts for a particular hardware after all. But a huge surprise for me was finding out that a mere homebrew program can actually emulate early PCs – such emulation, while perhaps less stunning visually, is a very complex task and thus also a very impressive thing.

What you see here is in fact not Norton Commander,
but its free Russian clone – Volkov Commander.

PSPDOSBox is a PSP port of DOSBox, a program that allows accurate emulation of DOS environment, in this case on your PSP (this sentence is sponsored by Captain Obvious). It is not a very user friendly homebrew and some amount of tweaking configuration files coupled with a number of trial and error runs will be necessary to set it up properly, but if you are patient enough, you will be rewarded with the ability to play PC games on your PSP – and isn’t that worth fighting for?

As for the speed of emulation, don’t forget that PSP has but a 333MHz processor and emulating a machine as complicated s PC requires significant processing power overhead. As a rule of thumb I would say that XT and AT games mostly run fine, 386 is pushing it, 486 is in some cases borderline playable and early Pentium is beyond the limit of what this emulator can do.

Also, DOS4GW games are generally a no-go, which is a shame. I tried some tricks, but was unable to run them. Some internet sources claim that it is feasible, so perhaps someone with more time, willpower or technical aptitude will manage to do that. I didn’t.

Have I ever told you that I have actually finished Targhan all by myself?

Taking the above limitations into account, I used PSPDOSBox to replay a couple of PC classics of old. I spent most of my time with games from a legendary French developer Silmarils. Metal Mutant, Targhan, Colorado, Star Blade, Ishar – these titles are as playable as they were fifteen years ago. Other games I have played include Prince of Persia, Fury of the Furries, Prehistoric and Electro Body. They all run fine, the only problem being key-mapping – PSP has significantly fewer keys than average PC keyboard.

You will have to excuse me, but I don’t remember exactly which combination of files I used to get DOSBox to run. Below is a couple of assorted links that I used to find files, configs and tips on running the games:
- posts tagged DosBox on QJ.net
- Google-translated Russian forum thread on PSPDOSBox (original here)
- description of p-sprint keyboard
I am afraid you will have to experiment with them by yourself, dear reader, but I assure you that these were my only sources and they were enough to get me to have a playable and usable version.

Other than that, I can only encourage you to give it a try – having a PC on your PSP is definitely awesome. There are even reports on the web of running Heroes of Might and Magic II on PSPDOSBox!

[PMS] SNESTYL – SNES emulation on PSP

Emulating Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) on PSP is possible using SNESPSP_TYL (don’t ask me to decipher the name).

To be honest, there is only one game that I have been playing more than once via this emulator, namely Final Fantasy 6, the underappreciated classic with great, deep story and fantastic characters. I have a plan to write more about it, but it is uncertain when I will have time to do it properly. I tried the recently released Game Boy Advance port of FF6, but the classic version holds up infinitely better in my opinion, so SNES emulation is the best way to dive into this great title, hence my interest in SNESPSP_TYL.

Back on topic, I have to admit I am not the most competent person to write more about SNES emulation – I have never owned one for that matter, so I have no idea how well the games are emulated. The limited selection of games (Mario, Metroid) that I have tested run smoothly – which is important when it comes to properly emulating more action-intensive games. They all look good, with aliasing provided by scaling, colours are vivid and gameplay in many cases is just great. That said, don’t ask me if it’s a faithful rendition – as I never played them in real life on a regular TV screen.

The emulator itself is appropriately user-friendly and boasts a good number of options. which I think is enough to give it Barts’ recommendation. Download it from the project homepage and enjoy retro gaming in all of its 16bit glory.

[PSM] NCDZPSP – NeoGeo CD on PSP

In 2007 I wrote a post on emulating NeoGeo on PSP, including information on how to play two player matches via Ad Hoc connection. I actually intended to check back on that particular emulator, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work under my 5.00M33-6 firmware. Judging by this post, some people managed to get it running – I didn’t. Nevertheless, I found another option to play my favourite Last Blade, namely Neo Geo CD emulator.

Therefore, we will assume that all is fine wth MVSPSP, and we’ll have a look at its sister emulator NCDZPSP. You can download it from PSPUpdates – there is detailed instruction in the comments below this post. The main difficulty is placing mp3s in correct place to have CD-quality soundtrack accompany one’s games.

Once it is set up, it’s smooth sailing from there on. Fluid framerates, excellent sound (CD!), user-friendly menus. The only downside is that CD versions take more then regular zipped roms. Overall verdict – yet another fine emulator on PSP.

[PMS] GPSP – Game Boy Advance emulation on PSP

My first contact with the original Game Boy Advance took place in 2002, when I bought it for my younger brother as a gift from my exchange semester in France. I remembered how much fun we used to have with the original Game Boy and I wanted to give him the best there was. Unfortunately, I didn’t have that much money, so I only bought two games to accompany the console, namely Castlevania and Doom.

To put things in proportion – in 2002 portable console with 16bits of power and color screen was really cutting edge. At that time Doom on a portable gaming console seemed something so technologically advanced that my non-gamer buddy who studied electronics at the time came to just watch me playing it and was in awe.

The gift met with a lot of cheering, as the recollections of both of us wasting long hours on playing the original gray Game Boy were still relatively fresh. And indeed, for the next year or so, before the charm finally wore off, Game Boy Advance has given us both a ton of fun. Castlevania, Doom, Golden Sun, Final Fantasy Tactics, Advance Wars, Fire Emblem – the gameplay of these titles was simply brilliant, sheer fun lasting for hours. It does say something about both games and the console that my best memories of summer 2002 were those spent tucked in the armchair in the corner of the room with Game Boy Advance and a copy of Advance Wars.

Fast forward to 2005, when PSP’s technological prowess seemed almost as if some impossible technological dream materialized on our eyes. Barely three years later after playing Doom on a handheld seemed like a triumph of science (okay, in service of entertainment, but still). It is a shame that this powerhouse did not have a software lineup to follow. But I digress.

Back on topic, you will be happy to hear that Game Boy Advance emulation on PSP is spot on. The only problem is that there is quite a bunch of GBA emulators, most of them abandoned in development, so it’s a bit hard to chose the right one. The best emulator I have found so far is Unofficial GPSP 3.2 Test 8.7 (that is a long name indeed), which I’ve found through comments below this post.

I’ve tried a couple of other emus just for fun, but the gentleman who recommended this version to me in comments was right – it is the best. There’s plenty of options, speed of emulation is excellent, no problems at all. Performance-wise, I have to admit that there are a few titles that slow down a bit at times or lose a couple of frames (this is most noticeable in Golden Sun’s quasi-3D fighting sequences). The vast majority of GBA games, however, runs flawlessly and even those that stutter a little in some sequences are very playable with minor frameskip.

Overall, PSP is giving Game Boy Advance game their well deserved second youth… or maybe third, not sure, Game Boy Advance SP might be considered their second youth… also, there’s Nintendo DS, so it would be fourth youth… and then DS Lite… okay, now this becomes Monty Python sketch, I think I’ll just scratch this line.

Thanks to wonderful PSP screen combined with aliasing effect provided by scaling up GBA games to fit it, these classics look better than ever. Playing Castlevania: Circle of the Moon on PSP made me realize how colourful this game really was the way its creators intended it to be – on original Game Boy Advance’s non-backlit screen it was so dark that player could barely see what was happening. I actually remember reading somewhere that development kits for Game Boy Advance were much brighter, which is why Castlevania turned out too dark on regular GBAs. Sure, it was building dark ambiance, but made this game virtually unplayable if perfect lightning conditions were not available. On PSP screen the colours are vibrant and vivid and game looks better then I remembered it from my first playthrough.

Same goes for other Game Boy Advance titles – they look great, their gameplay is as engrossing as ever plus there are all the perks of using the emulator, such as save states for example. Overall verdict is that emulation of Game Boy Advance on PSP is just great, allowing PSP users to effectively carry in their pockets two consoles in one. Two thumbs up for this incest relationship between Sony and Nintendo

[PMS] PSPUAE – Amiga emulation on PSP

If you have been around this blog for a while, you know that me and PSPUAE developers have a history together. There’s been a bit of drama, but we like each other now. At some point I stopped following releases of PSPUAE, but nevertheless I do support FOL, Horace and others and I do hope that they’ll reach real playable emulator before PSP becomes extinct.

For the sake of PMS (PSP eMulation Series) I have downloaded and tested the newest edition of PSPUAE. This latest revision sports Fame/C core, meaning that there the essential part of the emulator (engine, so to speak) was changed for this release. Of course, such transition is not something that can be made easily, so the devs warn that there might be some kinks in this version.

I tested it on a couple of games with mixed results:

• Warzone was noticeably faster, played smoothly without any frameskip,
• SWIV was faster, but with glitches,
• Wolfchild made PSPUAE hang up and I needed to restart it,
• Lotus III was playable, but with a lot of frameskipping.

There is no point crying about it, though, as the notice on PSUAE webpage by FOL states very clearly that:

Im only releasing this, because people wanted it. Be warned its unstable and can guru alot. That said it is faster.

Please do not post regarding crashing issues with this release, as I have already pointed out its flaws. Unless someone wants to improve the FAME/C CPU core, im done with it.

So if you don’t like it, you’ll have to go back to one of the previous versions, which, while probably a bit slower, are also significantly more stable and bug-free. All the downloads are available at PSPUAE project website.

[PMS] Game Boy Classic emulation on PSP.

What better way to celebrate the Game Boy twentienth birthday than write about how it can live on in the depths of our PSPs?

I think the fact that the third post on this blog was on Game Boy emulation goes to show how dear this platform was to me. In a sense, it still is, although I am not really playing it recently, except for rare attacks of retro-nostalgia. But at the time, it was really a coveted item, ever since I first saw it in the hands of redhead girl gaming at the lakeshore. Couple years later, when we could afford this kind of thing, my parents made the most cruel move by buying Game Boy to my younger brother. I am not sure you realise the deviousness of their plan – the control over the best toy in the house was in the hands of the youngest sibling, thus giving him incredible power over his older brother. My, was that a painful experience.

With Game Boy Classic, we have three choices of emulators on PSP: MasterBoy, Rin and aforementioned [e]mulator, each of them has some unique. Chronologically, Rin was the first one and even though it is not being developed anymore, it is a competent emulator. There is a choice of colour palettes, although none of them really floats my boat, there are different customization options – a good example of well-polished hombrew program. [e]mulator is much less configurable, but it offers Game Boy emulations as just one choice, the others being NES, Game Gear and other old 8bit machines of the era. My favourite GB emulator, however, is the one that was not out there yet when I was experimenting with emulating the gray box on the PSP for the first time: MasterBoy. It is actually so good that it deserves a separate paragraph.

The first distinguishing feature of MasterBoy is the ability to not only use general colour schemes (grey palette, green plette), but also have it colorize the games to make them look like their NES counterparts. This last sentence sounds a little strange, but the image above will serve as much better explanation.

The second great feature that I believe more emulators should include is the “rewind” option. Similar to Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time, player can rewind couple of last seconds of gameplay, thus avoiding death or just correcting the failed jump for a power-up. Taking into account how tricky and difficult some of these old games were, this is certainly a helpful feature for us, old gamers, with worsening eyesight and reflexes.

There is also an option to mirror levels, so even if you know Mario by heart, you can now rediscover it in reverse. The overall polish and attention to detail of this emulator is just plain incredible. It gets my wholehearted recommendation and even though its competitors are capable programs on their own, if I am to replay some Game Boy Classic classics (Mario II Golden Coins!), this is the way I want to do it.

[PMS] e[Mulator] & NesterJ – NES on PSP

Nintendo Entertainment System aka NES aka Famicon is probably the only retro-console that I have come in contact with as a kid, albeit unknowingly – a bit like Molière‘s Mr Jourdain, who didn’t know he was speaking prose all his life.

In early 90s in Poland there was a very popular console available called Pegasus, which I played at my buddies’ place and even almost bought on some occasion. Turns out, it was unauthorized hardware clone of NES (here you have a photo of it). Still, it was only long time later that I realised I have been playing NES games as a kid, just like my counterparts from more civilised countries, except I didn’t know about it. Seems like I was being covertly conditioned to be Nintendo fanboy – so covertly in fact that I didn’t realise, which is perhaps why it didn’t work.

Revisiting ye goode olde classics, I have now understood why NES was so immensely popular in its time and how it was possible for its clone to be popular in Poland even ten years later (and to hold up until now, actually): while simple, the games were very and I mean very playable. I have just finished playing Castlevania, Contra and Super Mario Bros and after all this time they still are fun to play. Somehow, graphical-wise they have not aged too badly either – I find their looks pleasent even today. However, take into account that I generally like pixel art, so perhaps I am not objective on this one.

If you are reading this, you must know this game…

As for emulating NES on PSP, nothing has changed during last two years. There are two emulators, NesterJ and e[mulator], that can be used and they will both do their job just fine. True, their last releases are from 2007 and 2006 respectively, but as it is sometimes the case, good software does not necessarily need to be incessantly updated.

NesterJ is user-friendly, runs smoothly and is feature-rich. Display can be customized not only with respect to size and ratio, but also colour palette, including a lovely retro sepia colour scheme. There is also great option of rewinding last couple of seconds of gameplay in Sands of Time manner – very useful in these oldschool games with killer difficulty. And if player knows their games by heart, there is also an option of mirroring game levels.

Compared to NesterJ, e[mulator] seems basic in its functions to the point of being primitive – there are only simple display and configuration options, nothing fancy. However, e[mulator] can be also used for emulating other systems, such as Gameboy, PCEngine, Sega Master System and more, good for those who don’t like having too many programs on their Memory Stick.

My personal choice and recommendation would be NesterJ, which is full of cool features and more customizable than e[mulator], but each of these homebrew programs will send you back in time to Famicon era in a comfortable seat. Whichever you chose, it will be a pleasant ride.

Also, while on the topic of the sweet 8bit console, remember that there’s a website with hundreds of NES games playable in browser window.

[PMS] PSPMO5 -Thomson MO5 on PSP

I never ever have come across Thomson computer, but it is one of the computers I wanted to have as a child. Not only was this French device totally unavailable in Poland, but also completely unknown, so how come?

The reason behind it was my parents had some old computer magazines from France and when I started showing interest in computers, they dug them out from the basement. In one of the magazines there was a commercial of the game for that machine, screenshots included – I literally spent hours staring at it and imagining how coll it would be to play this game. I am unable to find the exact version or scan of that commercial, but I have managed to find a similar one featuring same graphics. Voila:

The game in question was L’Aigle d’Or (Golden Eagle) and the computer was Thomson (even though above you can read Oric/Atmos). Now, for the sake of the PMS, I gave it a try twenty-something years later. Or at least I tried.

I used PSPMO5, Thomson MO5 emulator made by, can you guess it, our well-known buddy ZX-81. Unfortunately, this I was disappointed – the game did not load. I used different variants of autocompletion available, but I would always get some error. Since I have never used the machine and am too lazy to struggle with loading 8bit oldies too much, I wrote to ZX-81 with this question. Still waiting for the response, but it seems like there is something wrong with loading casette images (k7 files), as rom images load properly in the emulator, as other images would not load either.

All in all, I haven’t fallen in love with either emulator, game or Thomson itself, but at least I ventured into an unknown territory and brought you some amusement on my way back. Maybe you’ll have more luck with Thomson emulation.

[PMS] PSPVice – Commodore 64 on PSP

I am going to share one of my dirty little retro secrets here: I managed to live through 80s and 90s without coming into contact with Commodore 64 even once. Not sure how it is possible, seeing how widespread they were in Poland at the time, but it’s true. I have read about them in Bajtek, the most popular computer magazine of the era, but to me they were mystical creatures who existed in some other plane of reality.

I have actually learnt a lot about the machine when I started working as software developer in 2006, because one of my coworkers turned out to be ex-C64 coder. His stories on programming tricks possible on the small machine were incredible – coding assembler programs that would work in phase with TV screen’s moving electron beam in order to achieve more colours or higher resolution, or hacking graphics chip by sending carefully malformed commands in order to be able to access frame, a part of the screen unavailable through regular commands. No wonder that guy is tenfold better programmer than me – at the time, I was struggling with Basic on my Speccy.

But even though Commodore 64 was not the machine I would be very familiar with, it is one of the pillars of the 8-bit era, so of course I couldn’t let it slip when covering emulation on PSP. At first, I have given a try to PSPYape by ZX-81 (my default behaviour when trying to emulate anything 8bit), but for the first time in my life his creation failed me. I believe it is because this particular emulator has not been updated since 2007 and was trying to run it on custom firmware 5.00 M-33 5. If you can hear this, ZX-81, please update the program, s’il vous plait.

After some googling, I have found a working emulator: called PSPVice, it is a neat piece of homebrew that works on every firmware. There are different builds available on program’s website, so just chose the one for your particular PSP.

One of the most famous C64 titles of it era were Last Ninja and Giana Sisters, which I remember from stories of the old times. I gave these games a try and they were running great – plus they are still enjoyable to play. I haven’t seen any problems with emulation, but I admit my testing was not extensive. The only little annoyance was that saving screenshots didn’t work, which is why I am using the image from PSPVice website. There is an onscreen keyboard available and handy autcompletion mechanism that automates loading games for those of us who have no clue which command to use.

Out of curiosity, I tried running the superb Edge of Disgrace demo that I have written about recently, but apparently it is using Commodore 64′s hardware so extensively that PSPVice crashes. This often happens with demos pushing hardware to its limits, so it is not something that I would consider a drawback of the emulator.

All in all, PSPVice is a great emulator and does its job very well, so whether you want to go back to your childhood programming days or are curious why C-64 was almost a cult object for some, thanks to PSPVice your PSP is a good place to do it.

Update: It seems like PSPVice got updated recently, which makes it even better!