How well do PSP-Mini games emulate?

SlipSlot

Hi all,

Since PSP emulation is very hit and miss (mostly miss), I was thinking of including a handful of PSP-Mini titles in my RP collection.

Has anyone given this a shot and if so, what are you experiences? Do they emulate well? Is it worth it?

My initial thoughts on the titles to include are the below:

Age of Zombies
Angry Birds
Bloons
Bloons TD
Canabalt
Doodle Pool
Fieldrunners
Fortix
Hero of Sparta
Jetpack Joyride
Monopoly
N.O.V.A.
OMG-Z
Pac-Man Championship Edition
Paper Wars: Cannon Fodder
Spaceball: Revolution
Speedball 2: Evolution
Tetris
The Terminator
Twin Blades
Velocity
Who’s That Flying?!
Wizorb
Zenonia
Zombie Tycoon

Thanks in advance!!

BobHarris

@SlipSlot The only mini game I have is Tetris and it runs great at 1080p.

BJRetro

@SlipSlot I have an overclocked pi 3b+ and the psp minis I have tried tend to play well (have specifically tried angry birds, pac man and I think a few others on your list). Btw some of the regular games may also work. My daughter plays the Sims 2 Pets and I also find WWE All Stars runs well and Soul Calibur Dark Savior I think it is called. 2d games like Metal Slug XX run well. Seems the “action” 3D games are the ones that get too slow, like sports or racing. Lr-ppsspp needs some adjustments to the settings in the menus to run well, psp standalone emulator runs well. I also choose the setting to reduce the output resolution in the run command menu (CEA 3 for me) instead of full resolution.

Efriim

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1WNpoAl8NNMjfFZ2HfxhpB7HMqcyQqTC7

simpleethat

@Efriim I'm curious to see it. Personally I'm always looking to add more games to my builds

Efriim

I add a link to my googledrive and at it to my profile, for UMDgen, Spread32, PPSSPPspreadsheet, memcardrex, lunar.

ClassicGMR

Pi 3B+ with no overclocking.

I've used Angry Birds with no problem.

As for regular PSP games I have found that Dungeon Maker, Luxor, Puzzle Quest and Bomberman work ok. Nothing else I have tried so far works even remotely well.

Jeanne D'Arc doesn't render correctly. Castlevania is hit or miss with slowdowns. None of the Burnout games work.

BobHarris

@ClassicGMR Virtua tennis 3, Metal slug XX and Street fighter Alpha 3 Max all work great at 720p on a non overclocked pi 3. (No filters except for metal slug and frameskip set at 1.) Also I don't use lr-PPSSPP.

ballboff

@BobHarris said in How well do PSP-Mini games emulate?:

@SlipSlot The only mini game I have is Tetris and it runs great at 1080p.

Personally I would say you could do with running it at a lower resolution than that. 1080p resolution for psp is total overkill, the system itself has a resolution of 480 x 272, so anything over that is slowing the performance of the emulator unnecessarily. I mean if it runs 100% at full frame rate, then you don't need to worry about it.

BobHarris

@ballboff Lowering the resolution reduces the screen size as well. Full screen Tetris looks and plays great.

SlipSlot

@BJRetro @Efriim thanks very much guys, this is very useful - while I mostly started this thread to discuss how well PSP-Minis emulate, the main reason is because I've had such a hard time getting good performance from standard PSP titles, so your suggestions will definitely help me flesh out my PSP collection a little more.

If anyone else has any suggestions for any PSP OR PSP-Mini titles that emulate well on a RP3 B+ I'd be both intrigued and excited to hear about it!

As for disc-based PSP titles that I have personally discovered to emulate well:

LittleBigPlanet (thank god)
Harvest Moon: Hero of Leaf Valley
Family Guy

Efriim

@SlipSlot
You're welcome.
I think I'll start a PSP homebrew compatibility.
Extreme Caution with the Filer and Small Hex apps, the memory stick emulated on the sdcard and writes from these homebrew could cause adversity, and in general with all the homebrew, some will freeze in non-buffered.

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- AT3c; not loading past prx, plays the media files from PSP ISO-CSO
+ Bookr, PDF HTML djvu. Buffered rendering only(do not disable) frameskip=0(off) SimulateBlockTransfer=Enable, It still has a responsiveness thing missing button presses. Raspbian Desktop or maybe Acrodos are better alternatives.
+ Breakout
+ Cavestory
+ Cavestory - Jenka's Nightmare
+ Cavestory - A Lost Land
- Chess by zx81; based on gnuchess; hard menu error, like picodrive, freezes.
+ Commander Keen, episode one "invasion of the vorticons"
- Daedalus64; n64emu
- DGEN; ???ver  filecorrupt 
+ Dhammapada, can look like its frozen when first loading, The wheel of Buddha? the path of wisdom. Sayings.
- Dosbox; didn't really work in the first place.
+ EmuMaster V3.1; Takes a long ass time to load a rom, but it plays gbc-sms, and vgm alright.
- Exult PSP 2.2, the first menu responsiveness is awful, ingame doubleclicking is hard, exult bugs, I dont know. Don't turn FrameBuffer off. There is a script to install the latest exult version to Retropie.
+ Filer, has a music player and metronome and various other things; file management.
+ fMSX; MSX emulator, probably works better than the one in retroarch.
- GameMusicGear v1.5; unfortunately not loading at all; plays multiple videogame music formats, and looks cool, sometimes it would not load at all on real PSP so maybe it is possible. fat32 initialize error.
- Geometry Wars Portable. Low framerates.
- GO!messenger
- GPSP; Gameboy Advanced Emulator, menu blank
? HCL, Hydra Castle Labyrinth, maybe with the other version
- Jazz Jackrabbit, The version I had didn't seem complete, jump and options wouldn't work.
+ Modo, amiga mods and commodore sid music player, tracker music player. Works really well.
- MSforPSP; Moonshell... I think?
+ NesterJ AoEX R3; Nintendo, I don't know what to say about this. The latency is good. play in non-buffered.
+ NP2, NEC PC-98
+ NP21, Might have a curve to assign hdd and fdd, maxed out fps and froze in non-buffered mode.
- Picodrive; v1.92.3; has a variety of hard menu issues, but emulates fine
- PMPlayer Advance, it almost works but it doesn't and I don't know why, Ive never used this homebrew before.
- Powder v1.13, resonsiveness issues, crashes in non-buffered.
- PSPBPacker, Can edit PSPEboots videos and images. Lua error.
? PSPComic, I don't know how to set this one up. The themes need to go somewhere on the emulated memorystick.
- PSPIdent
+ PSPSeq 3.0.1; Music Sequencer; can load your own samples and sequence them into loops. Cool if you're dedicated to making music.
+ Rin; emulates GBC very good, I think I had to set some of these; frameskip=0, fast-memory=off, i/o timing=host
+ SmallHex; small hex editor.
- Snes9x mecm, maybe a directory error or mecm
- SMS Plus; menu graphics not rendered right.
- TempGBA
? Triple Triad, I could only find a firmware 1.5 version.
+ Wagic 0.19.5a; Magic the Gathering,  I don't know if it will freeze or crash in game.  It could take a while find the right version and download the card art for the set you want to play, and then set it all up, you might have to map extra buttons like home and note.

Right before I was testing all the emulators, I think I used small hex and edited the emulators.cfg making me unable to start ppsspp until I realized, thinking that none of the emulators worked. That is entirely what the caution was about. PPSSPP freezing is still highly likely with some of them, like picodrive.

Jenka's Nightmare is playable!
Modo works really well.

The rest of my homebrew collection, is on a IDE drive and I don't have any hardware setup immediately to connect to it.

Efriim

@Efriim
Harvest Moon Innocent Life works. A youtube kid showed me how changing the PSP CPU Clock to 80 will get the game to load normally and not freeze on the island intro.
System > Change emulated PSP's CPU clock = 80

Harvest Moon Hero of Leaf Valley plays really well.
Graphics > Mode = Buffered rendering
Graphics > Simulate block transfer effects = False

I couldn't get Wagic the Homebrew to work, not quite. The thing was kind of buggy on real PSP. There are quite a few versions, I didn't over exert myself trying to get all the assets to load without crashing, but it does start.

I got Monster Hunter 3rd to play fairly well there are some minor slow downs like in the center of town. Like the other games, they can be played in non-buffered mode, and disable software skinning. Enable hardware transform and vertex cache. The first two games get better performance, overclock is recommended. 3rd has an english patch that is non-HD that and works for ppsspp.
Graphics > Software skinning = False

Kingdom of Paradise/Heaven plays fine.