PPSSPP is a PSP emulator written in C++, and translates PSP CPU instructions directly into optimized x86, x64 and ARM machine code, using JIT recompilers (dynarecs).
PPSSPP can thus run on quite low-spec hardware, including stronger ARM-based phones and tablets, as long as there's support for OpenGL ES 2.0.
PPSSPP is only a few months old and thus not all PSP games are currently playable. However, compatibility is improving very quickly!
Some currently known playable games:
PPSSPP is an open source project, licensed under the GPL 2.0 (or later). Anyone is welcome to contribute their improvements to the code, and the hope is that over time this will resolve the compatibility problem, letting us all play the PSP games we wants on the devices of our choice.
PPSSPP is free to download and use.
A serious bug was fixed and suddenly a ton of vexing issues just dissappeared! For example, the 3D graphics being black in Persona 3 and the large graphics errors in the two main GTA games. Those are now very playable (on PC, a bit heavy for mobile)! Also, I found a major bug affecting Little Big Planet among others, fixing that as well. The UI now also has multi-language support, it's in Settings->System. All these fixes are enough to motivate a new official release, so here we go - 0.7.6! It may take a few hours before it's visible on Google Play.
Another month, another version of PPSSPP! This time I've only added 0.0.5 to the version number, but that's just because I'm saving 0.8, 0.9 and 1.0 for big future updates :) Don't worry, there's been plenty of improvements. Many more games run and some games run faster - the God of War games should now run well on modest PCs and for example the Monster Hunter games are becoming playable on fast phones (although without sound). And I've started to improve the UI - now there's a recent list and game icons in the game selector.
Anyway, stop reading and try it out! And don't forget to buy the Gold version if you use Android and want to support further development.
A couple of volunteers, angelXwind and the_avenger, have started to post iOS builds regularly, and basic Mac builds (better UI is coming). Check out the iOS and Mac sections of the downloads page.
PPSSPP has once again improved by leaps and bounds, thanks to plenty of hard work from everyone involved! Compatibility has gone up dramatically, speed has increased drastically (especially on mobile) and everything is just better. There's even horizontal tilt control! Some newly playable games are God of War (very slow though, but this will probably be fixed in the near future), Virtua Tennis, Megaman: Maverick Hunter X, Saint Seiya and games like Ace Combat X go in game. Enjoy!
I'm not gonna give a date for 0.7, but just thought that I'd give an update. You can look forward to seeing increased compatibility, for example Exit and its sequel now work, and Wipeout now runs at the correct speed, and the emulator will run a bit faster in general as usual. Expect PPSSPP to keep getting faster over time for quite a while longer!
I said previously that 0.7 would have multithreading but I don't think it's worth the trouble yet, there are many easier things to speed up and improve first, so that will happen later. You will still get a noticable speed boost, even if it won't use all your cores.
Yeah, so I found the bug. Turns out that LDR r0, [r0] should be encoded as 0xE5900000, not 0xE4900000. If you don't know what that means, well, I can just tell you that the problem was very hard to find but very easy to fix once I found it.
Alright, it's been a while so here's 0.6. It has a preliminary ARM JIT which greatly boosts speed on Android and other ARM platforms, and vertex caching which likewise improves performance quite a bit. Unfortunately I still haven't been able to fix a bug that causes the JIT not to work correctly on Snapdragon CPUs, instead it just crashes. I will fix this issue in an upcoming 0.61 release, stay tuned!
Also, a bunch of new games work but a couple have stopped working (like Mortal Kombat). These will be back, don't worry - it's what happens when emulators develop, sometimes when you fix things, things that worked "by accident" before breakxs until you fix another thing.
I have collaborated with Orphis to bring you development builds directly on the Downloads page. In other news, things are progressing and even more games are starting to work, including the games I promised for 0.5 but didn't make it to the main branch (FF7CC, FF Type 0). ARMJIT is working on a few Androids but crashing on most, so there's still lots of work to be done before 0.6.
The last release was over a month ago, but believe me, it's been worth the wait! PPSSPP 0.5 brings large compatibility improvements, much better audio, many graphics fixes, savegames working in many games, and save states too! All of this available for both Android and Windows, with more ports coming soon.
In this release we also make available the PPSSPP Gold version, which is a paid version with a golden icon but otherwise identical to the main release. If you want to support the development of PPSSPP, a great way is to buy PPSSPP Gold. Currently only available for Android.
Now, stay tuned for v0.6, for which I have planned to write a dynarec (JIT) for ARM, which will improve speed on Android.
PPSSPP is making very, very fast progress, new games are starting up daily but currently things are a bit unstable, many games that have worked have broken again. So, I'm planning to allow for a couple of more weeks of breakneck development and then a few days of stabilization before releasing a 0.5. If you're really impatient, you can build your own but it's quite shaky at the moment. But believe me, 0.5 will be worth the wait. Some things to look forward to:
If you're impatient, you can check out some cool screenshots in this thread and elsewhere on the forum. Note that good-looking graphics doesn't mean it's fully playable, but it's always a step forward.
So stay tuned for 0.5 in January, and then later for 0.6 for which I have planned the really big speed boost which will take a lot of work - an ARM JIT - and then possibly multithreading in 0.7. Until then, merry christmas/channukah/festivus/holidays and a happy new year from the quickly growing PPSSPP team!
Much improved graphics in several games, more games go ingame, more games go to title screen. The usual type of emulator progress :) See the downloads page for the new version (Windows + Android, others are coming soon), and see some new compatible games at the compatibility list.
Progress has been rapid, much thanks to several new contributors! As usual, see the downloads page for the new version, and look at the compatibility list.
Version 0.2 has now been released! Quite a few more games show something at least. See the downloads page and compatibility list.
Some progress has been made, PPSSPP can now decrypt games, a few more games reach the title screen etc. There's no new APK release yet. However the big news is that PPSSPP has been successfully ported to Blackberry 10 by xsacha, here's a a video of PPSSPP running on a Dev Alpha device. It can be downloaded on the downloads page.
And ppsspp.org has been launched!
Discuss this new emulator in the brand new PPSSPP forums! (check your spam folder for the confirmation mail when you register)
Also check out Dolphin Emulator, the world's top Wii and Gamecube emulator, co-founded by the same author.
PPSSPP
