News: PSP travels through time, gamers rejoice

July 02, 2005, 02:25 AM

by chazumaru, via Various -
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The most interesting aspect of the PSP/DS clash might be how the homebrew scene embraced both consoles, up to the point that not a week goes without a major step forward on one of these systems. Whereas the DS benefits from the already large GBA homebrew scene and receives enough attention to get some pretty interesting amateur games, the PSP is "helped" by its USB compatibility, a strong support from the Linux community and serious security issues that forced Sony to upgrade the console's firmware a few times already. Although most of the progress made on the PSP over the weekend concerns shady manipulations of very illegal nature, everyone should be glad to hear that emulation of older systems is taking giant leaps every hour.

Ports of PC emulators are all the rage right now, and some examples of emulators running on the PSP concern, among many other examples, the Megadrive (a.k.a. Genesis), the Neo Geo Pocket Color, the Super Famicom or the Neo Geo CD. These are still in early stages with several sound, frameskip or compatibility issues depending on the system.

More convincing are the NES, PC Engine (a.k.a. TurboGrafx) and MSX emulators. The NES emulator runs smoothly, with very few compability issues. The PC Engine emulator already covers Super CD-ROM² titles (as proven by this video acquired here), although a large capacity Memory stick would be needed. The MSX one is the most impressive. Based on fMSX, it includes a virtual keyboard that can be displayed simultaneously with the game in its original resolution, thanks to the jawdropping screen of the PSP. Most MSX1 games are accepted, as well as a bunch of MSX2/MSX2+ titles. All these emulators feature the usual options: scaling, sprite smoothing, savestates, button mapping et al.