A Successful Experiment with PSP Emulation

Recently, I had the opportunity to experiment with emulating popular PSP games on my device. The process was not without its challenges, and I encountered some issues that I'd like to share with you.

One of the first games I tried to emulate was Kingdom Hearts. I set up the game to run at 2x resolution, but unfortunately, it struggled to maintain a smooth frame rate. Even with the use of frame skip, the game's performance was still subpar, and I was only able to reach a maximum of 20 frames per second. The graphics fidelity suffered significantly when running at lower resolutions, making it difficult to enjoy the game.

I then moved on to Kingdom Hearts II, which also ran poorly on my device. Despite setting the resolution to 2x and using some hacks to improve performance, I was only able to reach a maximum of 22 frames per second. The game's performance improved slightly when I reduced the resolution to 1x, but it still struggled with the increased graphical demands.

Next up was Kingdom Hearts II, which I ran at 2x resolution with some hacks enabled. While this did improve the game's performance somewhat, its graphical fidelity suffered as a result, and it only reached a maximum of 30 frames per second. The game's performance was still inconsistent, and I experienced slowdowns when playing through certain sections.

After these disappointing results, I decided to try another game: Little Big Planet. To my surprise, this game ran incredibly well on my device, even at 2x resolution with all the default settings enabled. However, when I increased the resolution to 5x, the game's performance improved dramatically, and it reached a smooth 30 frames per second.

Finally, I decided to test one of the most notoriously difficult games to emulate: Final Fantasy Crisis Core. To my delight, this game ran extremely well on my device, even at lower resolutions. I was able to play through the first battle without any issues, and the game's performance only suffered slightly when using magic spells that generated a large number of particles.

Overall, my experience with PSP emulation has been mostly positive, but there are still some challenges to overcome. The most difficult games to emulate on this device seem to be Kingdom Hearts, Dark Resurrection, and God of War. However, with the right settings and hacks enabled, it is possible to achieve smooth performance on many popular PSP titles.

The success of my experiment has also made me realize that the Nvidia Shield TV, despite its higher price point, may be worth considering for those who want a more seamless gaming experience on their device. While it's not necessary to spend so much money, having an emulator like ppssppp can greatly enhance your gaming experience.

I'd like to thank you for watching this experiment and sharing my findings with you. If you're interested in learning more about PSP emulation or have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments below.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on guys this ETA Prime back here again today I am back with the Razer Forge and we're going to be testing out some PSP games I'm using PPSSPP 1.3.0 point1 now we'll go to my settings and I'll show you what I'm using here we have open GL buffered rendering frame skip is off and I am sitting at the rendering resolution of 2x some of these games run great and some of them don't run very well at all first game we're going to test is Tekken dark Resurrection now I'll give you a sound clip here there's a big problem when recording sound on YouTube from copyrighted music and games like this but sound works great in all the games that I've tested well welcome to the king of Iron Fist tournament as you hear now I did forget to do one thing here I need to go into settings and turn the FPS on I was pretty sure I had it on already okay here we are so the FPS is listed up in the top right hand corner so it's very shaky now this is Tekken dark Resurrection I believe this was Tekken six Tekken 5 runs amazingly on this but dark Resurrection struggles a little bit as you can see here on a lot of the Android devices Android TVs that I've tested this game has struggled for some reason we're going to go back and check the rendering resolution we're just going to go down to 1x see if that helps out any if not the game's going to be pretty much unplayable at that FPS there and it didn't help much at all we should be running at 60 FPS and we're only at about 45 so this game is just hard on PSP emulation so I'll change my rendering resolution back up and we'll test another game that's disappointing but Tekken 5 does run really well on this box next up Monster Hunter Freedom Unite and I do have a save here this game runs at 30 FPS and it's running at 30 FPS on the Razer Forge and it looks really good at this resolution you may be able to go up a little bit on this game here this game was very optimized for the PSP and it works really good on a lot of android devices that I've tested very fun game now I'm just going through the tutorial here we'll fight a couple monsters I Tred to transfer my saves over from other Android devices and a lot of the times they just won't transfer over it'll tell me that the load failed or something like that come on really nice though let's see if we can go up a bit here now when changing this rendering resolution it makes a big difference in the appearance we'll actually go from two to four I'm not sure if it's going to work but we'll try it out and as you see it looks so much cleaner at 4X yeah we're at 30 FPS not bad at all for this little box here it's got an older uh chipset in it you know the Snapdragon 805 they ran this in a lot of Flagship phones back in the day and it still holds its own at 1080p I haven't tried God of War yet I'm going to start the game I'll go through the initial cutcenes fast forward them for you and we'll see how it performs but I guarantee you we're going to need to go down in the resolution with this one and I'm not even going to risk it I'm going to go to 1x on this game I know how hard this game is to run throw a little bit of sound on here so you can hear it it very horrible I mean it is crazy bad we will not be able to emulate this game we're at 20 FPS if you turn frame skip on in this game it just starts flashing it goes crazy there's really not much helping this at all there are some hacks we could turn on I'm not going to try it cuz we will not even reach 30 FPS on this box this in my opinion is the hardest game to emulate for PSP it's just very hard I I don't know what it is it's pretty crazy though very very bad next up Kingdom Hearts and I'm going to go to 2x on this so as you can see I have a Save State here sound clip this game should run at a constant 30 FPS we're slowing down a lot here that's very disappointing because this is such a good game down to 22 FPS we're at 2x resolution go to settings 1 x and I'll turn some hacks on just to see what we got here so it does help out a little bit the graphical Fidelity is very compromised when you go down to 1x resolution and it's still slowing down in the very beginning of this game it ran really well in the initial tutorial but coming in here with all three characters on screen and some of these orbs the performance is just pretty bad I was really hoping it was going to run this game at full speed oh well let's try another game here I'm going to change the settings we just went back to stock settings 2x resolution all the hacks off Little Big Planet so had a load here got some sound on so you can hear it for a second really great emulation on this game this is a very optimized game for the PSP and it runs very well on a lot of systems I've tested it on so while we're here let's just see how high we can take this we'll go to 5 XPS and as you can see it looks really really good it's on par with the PS3 version at 5x 30 FPS really nice I got to turn the sound down I'll run through here a little bit and see how slow we can get it if you do get slowed down and you're at 5X just go down a little bit with the resolution you'll get that speed right back but it looks like this box is going to handle this game really good no trouble here guys you should be able to play all the way through this game with this box here so we'll go back and we'll try one more game that game is going to be Final Fantasy Crisis Core I haven't started this game yet I'm definitely going to need to go down in the resolution I will get into the first battle and we'll see how it performs all right guys little bit of sound here can't do much of this definitely get lag sounds dead on 30fps 2x resolution this game has performed very well in a lot of systems also one of the best games made for the PSP there we go oh we dipped down a little bit when we're using our magic here lots of particles on screen and I knew I was going to miss you all right here's where it's going to get good we'll be able to see if we can run this at full speed yeah you should have no trouble playing through this whole game here some of the more problematic games are definitely going to give you problems on this as you saw God of War uh Tekken dark Resurrection there's some other games that just don't run well with the PSP emulator really nice though let's see if we can go up one with this game because it looks really good if we can get a higher resolution we'll go to four I'm not counting on it but I got my fingers crossed yeah that seems to work pretty good right in nuggets oh get out of here I want to hit him with this blizzard but I know he's going to run out of the way so yeah I'm surprised that this box handled this PSP emulator as well as it did with the older 805 Snapdragon processor I really wasn't counting on it but I got to say it did pretty good I mean Little Big Planet Crisis Core we did struggle with Kingdom Hearts dark resurrection and God of War those are three of the hardest games to run on this ppssppp emulator a lot of Android boxes and phones do struggle with those games overall decent performance I mean you can get these on eBay for 99 bucks refurbished with the uh Servo controller that comes with it it's definitely worth it if you don't want to Fork out the $200 for an Nvidia Shield TV but if you have the extra cash go for the Nvidia Shield I appreciate you guys watching I have a lot more coming if you could hit that like button and subscribehey what's going on guys this ETA Prime back here again today I am back with the Razer Forge and we're going to be testing out some PSP games I'm using PPSSPP 1.3.0 point1 now we'll go to my settings and I'll show you what I'm using here we have open GL buffered rendering frame skip is off and I am sitting at the rendering resolution of 2x some of these games run great and some of them don't run very well at all first game we're going to test is Tekken dark Resurrection now I'll give you a sound clip here there's a big problem when recording sound on YouTube from copyrighted music and games like this but sound works great in all the games that I've tested well welcome to the king of Iron Fist tournament as you hear now I did forget to do one thing here I need to go into settings and turn the FPS on I was pretty sure I had it on already okay here we are so the FPS is listed up in the top right hand corner so it's very shaky now this is Tekken dark Resurrection I believe this was Tekken six Tekken 5 runs amazingly on this but dark Resurrection struggles a little bit as you can see here on a lot of the Android devices Android TVs that I've tested this game has struggled for some reason we're going to go back and check the rendering resolution we're just going to go down to 1x see if that helps out any if not the game's going to be pretty much unplayable at that FPS there and it didn't help much at all we should be running at 60 FPS and we're only at about 45 so this game is just hard on PSP emulation so I'll change my rendering resolution back up and we'll test another game that's disappointing but Tekken 5 does run really well on this box next up Monster Hunter Freedom Unite and I do have a save here this game runs at 30 FPS and it's running at 30 FPS on the Razer Forge and it looks really good at this resolution you may be able to go up a little bit on this game here this game was very optimized for the PSP and it works really good on a lot of android devices that I've tested very fun game now I'm just going through the tutorial here we'll fight a couple monsters I Tred to transfer my saves over from other Android devices and a lot of the times they just won't transfer over it'll tell me that the load failed or something like that come on really nice though let's see if we can go up a bit here now when changing this rendering resolution it makes a big difference in the appearance we'll actually go from two to four I'm not sure if it's going to work but we'll try it out and as you see it looks so much cleaner at 4X yeah we're at 30 FPS not bad at all for this little box here it's got an older uh chipset in it you know the Snapdragon 805 they ran this in a lot of Flagship phones back in the day and it still holds its own at 1080p I haven't tried God of War yet I'm going to start the game I'll go through the initial cutcenes fast forward them for you and we'll see how it performs but I guarantee you we're going to need to go down in the resolution with this one and I'm not even going to risk it I'm going to go to 1x on this game I know how hard this game is to run throw a little bit of sound on here so you can hear it it very horrible I mean it is crazy bad we will not be able to emulate this game we're at 20 FPS if you turn frame skip on in this game it just starts flashing it goes crazy there's really not much helping this at all there are some hacks we could turn on I'm not going to try it cuz we will not even reach 30 FPS on this box this in my opinion is the hardest game to emulate for PSP it's just very hard I I don't know what it is it's pretty crazy though very very bad next up Kingdom Hearts and I'm going to go to 2x on this so as you can see I have a Save State here sound clip this game should run at a constant 30 FPS we're slowing down a lot here that's very disappointing because this is such a good game down to 22 FPS we're at 2x resolution go to settings 1 x and I'll turn some hacks on just to see what we got here so it does help out a little bit the graphical Fidelity is very compromised when you go down to 1x resolution and it's still slowing down in the very beginning of this game it ran really well in the initial tutorial but coming in here with all three characters on screen and some of these orbs the performance is just pretty bad I was really hoping it was going to run this game at full speed oh well let's try another game here I'm going to change the settings we just went back to stock settings 2x resolution all the hacks off Little Big Planet so had a load here got some sound on so you can hear it for a second really great emulation on this game this is a very optimized game for the PSP and it runs very well on a lot of systems I've tested it on so while we're here let's just see how high we can take this we'll go to 5 XPS and as you can see it looks really really good it's on par with the PS3 version at 5x 30 FPS really nice I got to turn the sound down I'll run through here a little bit and see how slow we can get it if you do get slowed down and you're at 5X just go down a little bit with the resolution you'll get that speed right back but it looks like this box is going to handle this game really good no trouble here guys you should be able to play all the way through this game with this box here so we'll go back and we'll try one more game that game is going to be Final Fantasy Crisis Core I haven't started this game yet I'm definitely going to need to go down in the resolution I will get into the first battle and we'll see how it performs all right guys little bit of sound here can't do much of this definitely get lag sounds dead on 30fps 2x resolution this game has performed very well in a lot of systems also one of the best games made for the PSP there we go oh we dipped down a little bit when we're using our magic here lots of particles on screen and I knew I was going to miss you all right here's where it's going to get good we'll be able to see if we can run this at full speed yeah you should have no trouble playing through this whole game here some of the more problematic games are definitely going to give you problems on this as you saw God of War uh Tekken dark Resurrection there's some other games that just don't run well with the PSP emulator really nice though let's see if we can go up one with this game because it looks really good if we can get a higher resolution we'll go to four I'm not counting on it but I got my fingers crossed yeah that seems to work pretty good right in nuggets oh get out of here I want to hit him with this blizzard but I know he's going to run out of the way so yeah I'm surprised that this box handled this PSP emulator as well as it did with the older 805 Snapdragon processor I really wasn't counting on it but I got to say it did pretty good I mean Little Big Planet Crisis Core we did struggle with Kingdom Hearts dark resurrection and God of War those are three of the hardest games to run on this ppssppp emulator a lot of Android boxes and phones do struggle with those games overall decent performance I mean you can get these on eBay for 99 bucks refurbished with the uh Servo controller that comes with it it's definitely worth it if you don't want to Fork out the $200 for an Nvidia Shield TV but if you have the extra cash go for the Nvidia Shield I appreciate you guys watching I have a lot more coming if you could hit that like button and subscribe\n"