Quiet days in the emulation scene are far and few between and today was no exception as two significant things dropped just a few hours ago. In this article, we’ll be looking at the release of PPSSPP 1.9 and the advent of full speed PS1 emulation on the New 3DS!
PPSSPP 1.9 Released: Numerous accuracy/bug fixes, Vulkan optimisations and the end of Windows XP Support
As its name suggests, PPSSPP is an emulator for the PlayStation Portable and the go-to emulator at that. This emulator, whose original author is Henrik Rydgård, does not only emulate games pretty accurately with good performance but is also available on a wide variety of platforms including iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, macOS and the Switch among others.
PPSSPP is a very capable PSP emulator that’s able to make games look much better thanks to shaders like FXAA and resolution upscaling to resolution like 1080p and 4K!
Furthermore, it also boasts an impressive arsenal of features including save state support, a homebrew downloader, translations in tens of languages and the ability to render games at higher resolutions among others.
Now, PPSSPP 1.9 has been released which comes with:
- Various game issues have been fixed including:
- Flickering issues in GoW games that occurred with newer Mali GPU drivers
- The Tekken 6 leg shaking problem
- Disappearing officers in Warriors Orochi and issues in Tomb Raider on ARM64 devices
- Hanging in Bleach and Armoured Core games
- Audio glitches in FF Tactics
- The camera display in Invizimals
- Strange vehicle behaviour in MGS:PW
- Audio in Motorstorm: Arctic Edge
- Performance of GoW on Vulkan has been improved and Vulkan is now default on Android phone running Android 9.0 (Pie) or above along some optimisations to this rendering backend
- The homebrew store and UWP build received numerous fixes
- Hotkeys for dumping and replacing textures have been added
- Right analogue stick support for touch controls
- Mouse control on Windows has been improved
- Windows XP support has been dropped
- Numerous other minor fixes and improvements which can be found in the change log below
To grab PPSSPP 1.9, check out this link and select the download for the platform of your choice; for viewing its change log, go here.
PS1 emulation on the New 3DS is now running at full speed thanks to recent developments!
While the Nintendo 3DS isn’t a powerhouse by any definition of the word, it can still output some pretty decent graphics and do some pretty impressive things especially in regards to emulation. Now, its emulation capabilities have been expanded even further thanks to the folks at libretro provided your device is a New 3DS/2DS (XL) model.
The New Nintendo 3DS didn’t get many exclusive titles but the homebrew community used its improved capabilities to deliver good performance in PS1 and Commodore 64 titles (Vice3DS) – Image from linked blog post
According to a blog post on the libretro blog by Justin Weiss, some recent developments relating to PS1 emulation on the 3DS have pushed numerous original PlayStation games to playable territory on New 3DS/2DS consoles and these include:
- PCSX4ALL’s Unai renderer is now used in the 3DS builds of PCSX ReARMed which provides boosts of 10-20FPS over the previous P.E.Op.S. renderer that was being used
- This change comes at the cost of some accuracy but an enjoyable game is probably better than a more accurately rendered one!
- Support for the CHD format in the 3DS port which is a compression format best suited for disc images.
- This format reduces the file size of games and also improves their loading times. Framerate dips during FMVs and loading zones also get reduced
Furthermore, full speed cores (dynarec-enabled ones) can be launched from the homebrew menu through ‘3dsx’ files negating the need to litter your 3DS Menu with cores installed from CIA files to get the best experience.
To make use of the improvements mentioned above and play many PS1 games on your New 2/3DS console, follow this link to grab the latest Nightly builds. The next official release of RetroArch will implement the aforementioned improvements.
Conclusion
For more stuff relating to emulation, you may be interested in the release of MAME 0.214 which took place a few hours ago, a recently published blog post about Beetle PSX’s WIP dynarec and a video by ‘byuu’ (bsnes’ creator) explaining how HD Mode 7 works.
The post Emulation News: PPSSPP 1.9 released with numerous fixes & drops Win XP support; PS1 emulation on New 3DS consoles now runs at full speed for most games thanks to new renderer! appeared first on Wololo.net.