PPSSPP 1.16 - release announcement and progress report
PPSSPP 1.16 is now out! Get it on the download page!
PPSSPP 1.16.1-6 were also released, with some important hang and crash fixes.
For fine details, see the news item.
RetroAchievements support
RetroAchievements is a long-running project to add "achievements", similar to Xbox Achievements or Playstation Trophies, to game for old video game consoles, in order to add extra challenges and improve replayability, and also making the whole experience feel a bit more modern.
In 1.16, PPSSPP adds full support for RetroAchievements. On the System tab in settings, you can now click RetroAchievements to reach a dialog where you can log in to your RA account. You can't register the account directly from within PPSSPP though, as it's an external service.
RetroAchievements has a very passionate community and is getting more and more popular. Unfortunately, achievement definitions are not yet available for all games, and on the PSP they're often only available for a single regional version of a game, so watch out for that if you want to try it. To check, on the RetroAchievements website when browsing games, you can check the "Supported Game Files" link on a game's page to see which UMD you'll need to acquire and dump.
Important fixes in 1.16
- A lot of people on Android 13 devices ended up in a situation where the choose-a-folder dialog during set up didn't work correctly. This has been fixed.
- Multiple input event handling fixes, should help with external joysticks
- Perf improvements on lower end devices by disabling ubershaders
- Multiple fixes for glitches like flicker in WWE vs Smackdown 2006, shadows in Motorstorm, etc.
- Lots of additional performance improvements and fixes
- Multiple bugfixes around texture replacement, fixing Tactics Ogre fonts among other things
New JIT backends by [Unknown]
A background development that most people won't notice yet, but will have long-term performance benefits in addition to compatibility with more CPU architectures, is the addition of new IR-based JIT compiler backends.
PPSSPP has long supported recompiling the PSP's MIPS code to an easier-to-interpret intermediate representation which we call IR, in order to speed up platforms where we can't always JIT-compile like iOS. This IR is not only easier for the CPU to interpret than raw MIPS instructions, but can also easily be processed through optimization passes, which can thus be general across architectures.
We've long had a plan to eventually try to compile the IR to native code, which would gain the benefit of general optimization passes, while still producing really fast native code. When starting his RISC-V backend, [Unknown] chose to use this approach, and then proceeded to write x86/x86-64 and ARM64 backends, too. Currently, these are at parity or a bit faster than the existing JITs, but much less tested which is why they're not yet selectable in the UI.
Correct emulation of vrnd by fp64
fp64 has been working on trying to reverse engineer accurate implementations of some of the more obscure math instructions of the PSP's VFPU, a custom little SIMD coprocessor. Previously he solved sin/cos/sqrt among others, now the turn came to the vrnd instruction. Surprisingly it seems to consist of a mix of multiple traditional random number generators. Some details can be found in this issue on github.