PPSSPP 1.19 is here with some huge changes!

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PPSSPP is one of the best emulators out there. It lets you play PSP games. And as you might’ve seen, the PSP is one of my favorite retro* consoles.

🤢

Yes, it makes me sick thinking about how the PSP is now an inarguably retro console. But I just have to deal with it, I guess.

If you missed it, I wrote up an article about all the things we lost when we left the PSP hardware behind in favor of emulation. And some folks somehow mistook that article as a slight against the PSP emulation scene.

On the contrary! PPSSPP’s emulation is so terrific that, for the last decade plus, I haven’t had the need to use official hardware. The article was all about rediscovering the PSP and the features of the system software.

But this article is about the latest PPSSPP updates and changes that hit last week. So let’s talk about it!

1 — New Music Player

The PSP is a device of it’s era... and Sony of that era? They were the definition of not invented here syndrome. It’s a condition that affects many companies and makes them believe that they can’t rely on outside technology.

Need removable storage for the PSP? Why not create a new form of optical media? The UMD is born.

Or how about something more read/writable? The overpriced and underspec’d MemoryStick Duo is Sony’s solution.

The MemoryStick PRO Duo's maximum storage capacity can be measured in Megabytes.

What about a compressed audio format that can save developers space? Atrac3+.

Oh, you’ve never heard of Atrac3+? Well, it has heard of you.

Atrac3+ was the proprietary audio compression codec that was used by a huge swathe of PSP titles. It was initially developed as part of Sony’s proprietary Minidisc format.

Don’t be fooled. This isn’t a UMD. It’s the *other* small form factor cassette-bound disc produced by Sony. But these were (usually) rewriteable.

Atrac3+ was supported by a high-level library built into the PSP firmware. Yet, even with built in firmware support, many games shipped a version on the disc.

According to the announcement post:

Our previous implementation was mostly based on guesswork and vibes, but this time I've reverse engineered in detail how it works, mainly through intense testing on hardware. This has fixed a large number of long-standing compatibility problems - for example, the music in Flatout now finally works correctly.

2 — Multiplayer

The scene around PSP games has really blown up recently. Much like how Insignia is resurrecting the Original Xbox’s online service, there have been groups out there bringing their own custom servers online to revive some long-dormant online functionality.

A few standouts include LittleBigPlanet’s LittleBigRefresh, MOHH Revival (Medal of Honor: Heroes), Outrun2006 Tweaks, Antigravity Racing Foundation, and the impressive PS Rewired project that looks to stand up hundreds of game’s online infrastructure across PS2, PSP, and PS3 titles.

There were several PPSSPP forks that aimed to provide support for the various ways the community was solving the dead instrastructure problem. So PPSSPP proper took that as a challenge and this new update adds support for these servers as well fixing some bugs in Ad-hoc mode as well.

3 — Debugging

PPSSPP has added a native, built-in and cross-platform debugger called ImDebugger. Not only does ImDebugger support inspecting RAM, breakpoints, and other basic features but you can step through both CPU code and GPU draw calls. This should help expedite the process of PPSSPP development, but also the creation of homebrew!

4 — Fixes and Features

PPSSPP has started the work of Low Level Emulation or LLE. What does this mean? Well, games on the PSP (and other platforms) rely on software libraries in order to carry out basic functions. As we talked about earlier, the playback of Atrac3+-encoded audio is not handled by the developer. They pass the decoding and playback off to a library to do that.

In this case, though, the emulator doesn’t use the library that the game ships. Instead, they’ve reverse-engineered the audio format and have written their own library that runs as native code on your device. This is what’s known as High Level Emulation.

By contrast Low Level Emulation, is when the emulator runs the libraries that the game ships.

In this update, they’ve started performing LLE with the scePsmf and sceCcc libraries which has resolved some “serious bugs” in titles like Socom Fireteam Bravo 3.

They’ve also fixed some rendering and performance bugs. Games like Persona ½’s battle transitions, smoke effects in Jak’n’Daxter, lens flares in a whole bunch of games, and more.

I’m a huge fan of PPSSPP and it’s great to see how far the emulator has come. You can check out their announcement post and their full changelog here.