|
PPSSPP is one of the nicest surprises in emulation in years. It just kinda came out of nowhere and not only emulates almost every PSP game perfectly, but goes beyond that and offers smoother framerates, better controls and much higher resolution graphics. The interface is really slick, too. As for recommendations, I'm going to second the Metal Gear Acid games, especially MGA2. The first one was kinda rough, but the second was one of my favourite games on the PSP. You'd not think that Metal Gear could work as a tactical board-game/CCG hybrid, but you'd be wrong. Wipeout Pure is a nice showcase for what the emulator can do. It runs at 60fps solid - it's like an instant HD remake. Echoing the recommendation for Rengoku 2. It's surprisingly fun, and it opens up a lot more after you beat the main dungeon. The story starts making sense at that point, and a roguelike random dungeon becomes available.
|
#
¿
May 6, 2014 01:37
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 01:23 |
|
|
Tiny screenshots seem to be missing the point of PPSSPP. Here's some full HD Zettai Hero Project: (Click the numbers to enlarge your party member) I love emulators like this. You can really feel them removing the shackles of outdated hardware and really letting some games stretch their legs. The worst thing about the PSP was the hardware itself. Limited battery life, low-res screen, CPU underclocked to compensate for the drain of the UMD drive and wonky controls. It had a ton of great games, and now they've transcended the console itself. And here's some 1080p Draculax. Probably the ugliest location in the game, but drat, you can see all the details on Richter's suit. 
Dominic White fucked around with this message at 20:16 on May 6, 2014 |
|
#
¿
May 6, 2014 20:10
|
|
|
And on that note, the advantage of playing it on PPSSPP is that you can use the zoomed out camera mode and not lose a single bit of detail. The only real question is whether you filter your sprites or not. Filtered:  Unfiltered:  The difference isn't visible unless you zoom in. Now, I know anti-aliasing your pixel art is considered a faux-pas at best, and blasphemy at worst around here, but I honestly think this emulators implementation looks great. Both options look pretty nice here, I reckon.
|
|
#
¿
May 8, 2014 12:08
|
|
|
That'd be the Hybrid + Bicubic upscale type, 2x level, same as I used in that ZHP screenshot above. It works nicest with Nearest Neighbour texture filtering, but that does mess up some effects in some games. Thankfully it also protects the sprites against blurring if you're using Linear filtering, too. Also, a general recommendation for Zettai Hero Project, aka ZHP. It's Disgaea as a roguelike. It's funny, silly and very dorky. Mostly story-driven, with your base character stats carrying over between dungeons, even if you level and gear doesn't. Dominic White fucked around with this message at 12:45 on May 8, 2014 |
|
#
¿
May 8, 2014 12:36
|
|
|
Brasseye posted:there was a sequel that was sadly never translated. This seems to be a recurring theme with the PSP. So many cool games that never escaped Japan. Hell, Square even released a high-budget, high-profile Final Fantasy game (Type Zero) on the system and never localized it. Thankfully there's a fan-translation coming out, but a lot of PSP games will likely never get an English release. I'd like to play R-Type Tactics 2 in english some day. Word is that it has a really depressing plot.
|
|
#
¿
May 8, 2014 15:48
|
|
|
Yeah, looks like a near-complete translation was released a while back. It seems very poorly documented and explained on the official site, though, and they just abruptly stopped updating in January.
|
|
#
¿
May 13, 2014 14:45
|
|
|
It's been ages since the last major stable release, so the current nightly builds are much closer to 0.99 than before. It really isn't a long road from where the emulator is currently to perfect support of everything, which is kinda amazing.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 18, 2014 13:50
|
|
|
Neurion posted:A rare niche game that I found on PSN and got running on PPSSPP is the giant robot programming game Carnage Heart EXA. Holy poo poo, they released an English version? How did I never hear about that? Oh, yeah. It was never released in europe. Anyway, I loved the original PSX version. I've gotta try that out sometime! Edit: The English version was released only late last year? Digitally? Weirdness, but cool! Dominic White fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Jul 23, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Jul 23, 2014 16:00
|
|
|
I just noticed that V0.9.9 of PPSSPP rolled out yesterday. Amazing how far they've come, and how quickly. I wouldn't be surprised if V1.0 had 100% support for known, released games at this rate.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 24, 2014 00:12
|
|
|
RadicalR posted:Not quite. There are a few rare games that are very broken on it. True, but how many of those will be broken by the time V1.0 comes out, considering how long 0.99 was in the works?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 24, 2014 02:10
|
|
|
RadicalR posted:I wonder if it would be possible to port the translation over? I'd hope so. I loved Warship Gunner 2 to bits. It's such a huge, complex meaty game with some weird balance issues that it sounds like the PSP version addresses.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 28, 2014 14:39
|
|
|
Here's a nice before/after illustrating the power of PPSSPP. Native PSP resolution, no filtering - as authentic to the handheld as possible, but probably a bit prettier than the real thing:  Maximum Shiny:  So many PSP games are remarkably good-looking, but shackled by hardware. This emulator lets them breathe.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 31, 2014 22:43
|
|
|
Drifter posted:What settings are maximum shiny? 10x internal PSP resolution, 4xHQ GLSL post-processing, 2xHybrid+Bicubic Upscale w/ Deposterize, Auto texture filtering, 16xAF rendered out at 1080p. Runs perfect (60fps where games support it) on a 660ti. Any higher on the upscaling and it not only starts to look a little weird (rough edges where there shouldn't be on textures), but stutters any time new textures appear.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 31, 2014 22:54
|
|
|
Regarding those settings, for some games it works great. For others, you get faint lines around some sprites - usually large ones - you can fix this by changing the texture filtering type to Nearest Neighbour. It may break some effects that rely on smoothed textures, though.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 31, 2014 23:28
|
|
|
Hybrid + Bicubic filtering looks pretty good for UI elements for the most part if you leave it at 2x. Any higher and you start to get artifacts. It's not perfect in all games, but Type-0's UI isn't negatively affected by it at all. You can even keep texture filtering on Linear.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 1, 2014 00:28
|
|
|
Here's a pretty good video on why people play Monster Hunter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyKyaE_HKV0
|
|
#
¿
Sep 4, 2014 04:21
|
|
|
Drifter posted:Also, until I played Final Fantasy Type-0 I had never seen a chocobo brutally gunned down by an execution squad and bleed out in the middle of a city street. It's a little grim, innit? I mean, it starts with our fresh-faced teenage military heroes ripping through the streets, killing fleeing enemy soldiers and fueling their magic by quite visibly ripping the essence from their foes corpses.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 4, 2014 11:54
|
|
|
One recent PPSSPP addition (it might be just in the Github builds?) that I highly recommend everyone turn on is 'Load ISO into Memory' if you've got 8gb RAM or more. It'll add maybe 5-20 seconds initial load time to the game, but it speeds up emulation hugely, especially streaming upscaled textures. On top of that, it reduces natural load times in-game down to effectively nil. Deploying units in Valkyria Chronicles 3 is now snappier and more responsive - no more of that telltale brief pause as it accesses the character data on the 'disc'. Also, this really doesn't look like a PSP game anymore, does it?  I've found that forcing the virtual PSP to run at 1ghz also speeds some stuff up, and avoids some sound sync issues. Dominic White fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Nov 24, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Nov 24, 2014 22:08
|
|
|
InfinityComplex posted:Can you say the version and settings you have for reference? That sounds really interesting to use. Version: Latest 64bit dev build. Settings... (Graphics) - Rendering mode Backend: OpenGL Mode: Buffered Simulate Block Transfer = On - Framerate Control Frameskipping: Off Autoframeskip: Off Prevent FPS from exceeding 60: On Alternative Speed: 0 -Features Postprocessing: FXAA Fullscreen: On Stretch: Off Small Display: Off - Performance Rendering Resolution: 4xPSP Vsync: On Mipmapping: On Hardware Transform: On Software Skinning: On Vertex Cache: On Lazy texture caching: Off Retain changed textures: On Disable slower effects: Off Spline/Bezier Curves: High - Texture Scaling Upscale level: 4x Upscale type: xBRZ Deposterize: On -Texture Filtering Anisotropic: 16x Filtering: Auto Scaling: Linear - Hack Settings All Off (Audio) Sound: On Audio Latency: Medium (System) Fast Memory: Off Multithreaded: Off IO On Thread: Off Force Clock Sync: On Emulated CPU Clock: 1000 Respect FPU Rounding: On Atomic Audio Locks: Off Windows Keyboard: Off Save Path: Off Cache Full Iso In RAM: ON (Important) Everything seems to run perfectly at its maximum native framerate. 4xPSP resolution is 1080p almost exactly, combined with 4x xBRZ upscale means that there shouldn't be any graphical artifacting from the process. No texture breaking or goofs that I've seen, at least. The biggest thing is caching ISO to RAM - it speeds up texture upscaling massively. Before, 4x would cause it to stutter quite heavily. Now I almost never see a frame dropped. End result: Valkyria Chronicles 3 is all growed up.  I've got a midrange PC - i5-3570k, Geforce 660ti, 8gb RAM - you could probably drop resolution and scaling down one notch and get a bunch more performance if you needed it. Edit: Just did one more test - Metal Gear Acid 2 hits my systems limits. It can only hit 89% emulation speed. Dropping it down to 3x rendering resolution gets it back up to 100 again. Dominic White fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Nov 25, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Nov 25, 2014 22:37
|
|
|
BadAstronaut posted:Don't you think these games suit being hooked up to the PC and running on, say, an Xbox 360 controller? It identifies the 360 controller natively. Didn't even have to set up my controls - the Home button brings up the save-state menu, too. The PSP had a lot of pretty beefy RPGs and ports from consoles, so yeah, no reason not to enjoy it this way.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 25, 2014 23:42
|
|
|
BadAstronaut posted:Dammit, TV not PC. I've got my TV set up as a second monitor for that exact purpose.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 25, 2014 23:44
|
|
|
Nate RFB posted:How do your VC3 character portraits look with this? I switched to Bicubic because xBRZ made them look like a smeary mess for me, unless this is mitigated by some of your other options. Looks pretty good to me - I think 2D stuff upscales pretty gracefully with those settings:     Edit: Those are all at 3x render resolution, but I think it's still 4x texture scaling, which should be excessive but doesn't seem to have much negative effect. Edit 2: Yep I also turned on Fast Memory, Multithreaded, I/O on Thread and Force Real Clock Sync, seemingly to no ill effect. Dominic White fucked around with this message at 15:26 on Dec 5, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2014 15:15
|
|
|
Anything with really low pixel density is going to be illegible no matter what, like the little hand-drawn notes on the text screens. It's just as hard to decipher without upscaling, so I figure it doesn't make too much difference either way.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2014 15:29
|
|
|
Honestly, I don't think it's that big of a difference. The main reason I use xBRZ is because bicubic kicks up a whole lot of graphical artifacts on multi-sprite tiled layouts. Menus in particular tend to have faint lines/breaks in them, which looks really janky. Of all the upscaler types, xBRZ is the only one that doesn't seem to generate any errors.
Dominic White fucked around with this message at 11:43 on Dec 6, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2014 23:40
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 01:23 |
|
|
Some nice features in this new version too, including being able to set different option profiles on different games. Perhaps this thread needs a reboot, because most people wouldn't really notice this otherwise. Oh yeah, and it looks like there's still some life in PSP games - XSeed just released the English version of the Brandish remake, remember!
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2015 23:31
|
|