Hard-drive failure managed to raze every article published on Wololo for the last 4 months which is quite unfortunate but this will not stop new content from being published while older articles are recovered! As the site is back up, we’ll be looking at TheFlow’s GePatch 0.2.0 that was released last weekend which improves some games but introduces regressions in others!
What is GePatch?
With GePatch, PSP games can be run at native resolution the Vita which makes them look much better but not all games are fully compatible!
GePatch is a plugin by TheFlow for the PSVita & PlayStation TV that allows one to play PSP games at the consoles’ native resolution of 960×544 through the highly popular Adrenaline ePSP solution. This means that games have to push 4 times as much pixels than they do normally as the PSP’s screen only has a measly resolution of 480×272 but a good amount of games respond well to this which is pretty surprising considering that with GePatch, games are still running on the PSP hardware found within the PSVita!
According to some tweets made by TheFlow, GePatch is able to achieve 4x resolution upscaling by patching display lists and vertices within the PSP’s graphics engine which allows it to support a wide variety of games. This required less effort than porting PPSSPP’s GPU which was floated as a potential solution for running PSP games at native resolution on the Vita a while ago.
What does GePatch 0.2.0 bring along?
As of right now, there are 200 games that are perfectly playable with GePatch but it’s advisable to check the spreadsheet below first to check which version is best to use with the game you want to play! (Chart from spreadsheet below)
GePatch 0.2.0, which was released during the weekend, comes with:
- The ability to bypass GE patches by holding the L-trigger when starting a PSP game
- This allows one to properly play games that do not work too well with GePatch while still having the plugin installed
- The framebuffer copy algorithm and behaviour of the sync opcode have been updated
- Forced dithering (down to 16-bit colour from 32-bit) has been disabled
- TheFlow notes that this update adds flickering to some games meaning that GePatch 0.19.1 may work better in some titles but consulting the compatibility spreadsheet linked below is always recommended!
- Games that saw improvement as per the compatibility spreadsheet include:
- Fat Princess: Fistful of Cake – better performance
- Rurouni Kenshin: Meiji Kenkaku Romantan – Saisen – better performance
- flOw – almost perfect
- Medal of Honor: Heroes 2 – game is playable but there is some clipping
- Titles affected by the flickering issue include Gitaroo Man Lives!, Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure and others
Conclusion
You may grab GePatch 0.2.0 from the link below but do note that in some titles, flickering issues have been introduced so use it with care! To check out whether the game you wish to play is playable, you can check out the spreadsheet linked below which is maintained by the Vita community and comes with pretty nice formatting.
GePatch 0.2.0 download link: https://github.com/TheOfficialFloW/GePatch/releases
GePatch Compatibility Spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aZlmKwELcdpCb9ezI5iRfgcX9hoGxgL4tNC-673aKqk/edit#gid=0
The post PSVita Release: GePatch 0.2.0 released with ability to skip GE patches & more – Over 200 playable games & almost 300 titles running with minor issues @ the Vita’s native resolution! appeared first on Wololo.net.