TempGBA4PSP - New Build

[Jon the Savage]

thank you so much for your hard work! not being able to run unbound was the reason i dropped my psp as my main emulation device four or five years ago, it's a huge treat to see someone finally cracked the code ive certainly been nostalgic for the ol psp lately, that's for sure.... ^~^

 

[johnlikespsp]

Long time psp fan here (since the US release in 2005)

Ive had 10+ psp's over time, mostly 2000 and 3000s, playing on/off, and have been running custom firmware for like 20 years now.

I started testing out this emulator in search of finding the best psp GBA emulator to play custom pokemon roms

Ive used gpsp kai for 10+ years with no issues with any stock gba games but I found that performance was absoleutly terrible with any custom rom (well except pokemon liquid crystal, the only custom pokemon rom ive had for 10+ years)

I was testing out FrogGBA but the latest release 0.3.3 is super buggy. The 0.2.4 release works okay, but performance is still not ideal. TempGBA-mod was slightly slower than FrogGBA and i disliked that i couldnt get it in fullscreen. Then I came across this fork..

Big thank you for all the hard work youve put into bringing this emulator back to life. So good to see others still avent given up on the psp.

I've been playing Pokemon Emarald Imperium on it for about an hour and its been running 99% perfect so far, performance wise. That only time i see a slight drop to 45ish FPS is while saving.

The only issue I've noticed is when i put the psp in sleep mode and then turn it back on, its completely frozen. and I have to power cycle the psp.

I'll also test out Pokemon Unbound and report on that too soon.

 

[leapster]

thank you so much for your hard work! not being able to run unbound was the reason i dropped my psp as my main emulation device four or five years ago, it's a huge treat to see someone finally cracked the code ive certainly been nostalgic for the ol psp lately, that's for sure.... ^~^

Thank you for your kind words! There is a new release - https://github.com/andymcca/TempGBA4PSP-mod/releases/tag/20260807

Please try out and if you have Reddit, spread the word! I am totally biased but I think this fork is the best you're going to get for GBA emulation on the PSP at the moment

Post automatically merged: Today at 2:58 PM

Long time psp fan here (since the US release in 2005)

Ive had 10+ psp's over time, mostly 2000 and 3000s, playing on/off, and have been running custom firmware for like 20 years now.

I started testing out this emulator in search of finding the best psp GBA emulator to play custom pokemon roms

Ive used gpsp kai for 10+ years with no issues with any stock gba games but I found that performance was absoleutly terrible with any custom rom (well except pokemon liquid crystal, the only custom pokemon rom ive had for 10+ years)

I was testing out FrogGBA but the latest release 0.3.3 is super buggy. The 0.2.4 release works okay, but performance is still not ideal. TempGBA-mod was slightly slower than FrogGBA and i disliked that i couldnt get it in fullscreen. Then I came across this fork..

Big thank you for all the hard work youve put into bringing this emulator back to life. So good to see others still avent given up on the psp.

I've been playing Pokemon Emarald Imperium on it for about an hour and its been running 99% perfect so far, performance wise. That only time i see a slight drop to 45ish FPS is while saving.

The only issue I've noticed is when i put the psp in sleep mode and then turn it back on, its completely frozen. and I have to power cycle the psp.

I'll also test out Pokemon Unbound and report on that too soon.

Thank you too for your comments - as mentioned there is a new release - https://github.com/andymcca/TempGBA4PSP-mod/releases/tag/20260807

Pokemon hacks are always tricky on PSP for a few reasons -

1) Sometimes the 'hack' code is less than robust, bordering on undefined behaviour (like null pointer dereferences and stuff like that) which 'works' on real hardware and more accurate emulators like mgba, but - alas - will cause gpsp variants like TempGBA to choke

2) Sometimes the Battle graphics effects will use alpha blending (big performance hit on PSP if done extensively) and/or HBLANK IRQs (same) and the poor 333Mhz in PSP just doesn't have enough to cope. In my fork I've ported the old ARM Assembly blending routines that Exophase did all those years ago to MIPS, which improves speed on the 'Old' graphics renderer (still need to get these working with the 'New' renderer if possible). I've also exposed the HBLANK IRQ setting in the user options, so you can control it. gpsp-kai had this hard-coded to be 1 - 160. Normal hardware is 1 - 228. A good compromise setting which seems to work well is 1 - 161, but you can now experiment with it to see what works best for your particular game. Getting it wrong will result in missing graphics effects or odd glitches.

3) Music engines - some engines (particularly on Pokemon Unbound and Pokemon Heart & Soul) mix song data in with code. This creates a perfect storm for the Dynamic Recompiler used in all gpsp variants, because it causes the code cache to be continuously flushed when music is playing (hence why performance with music ON can be poor). TempGBA has a nice upgrade originally written by Nebuleon which allows code blocks to be i) flushed individually and ii) re-used if possible. This gives us a nice speed up but not quite enough to offset the Music engine scenario. So I've further improved this by introducing 'cutpoints' which are a slight variation on the old Translation Gate system. This allows us to manually stop code execution at certain points in IWRAM/EWRAM to minimise the size of the blocks that get recompiled all the time - in these instances, I've used some Python scripts to find the exact locations the music engine uses in these games to target these.

Unfortunately in the case of Pokemon Heart & Soul, the churn is so bad that it's still a bit jerky even with all of those changes!

Still - it means I can target changes as required to help if you find another Pokemon Hack isn't quite running as well as it should Let me know if you run into any issues and I'll try and help.

 

[johnlikespsp]

Thanks for taking the time to explain that!

I forgot to mention I am using the latest 20260807 release. Surprisingly, I've gotten about 30min into Pokemon Unbound with mostly default settings in the emulator, and the in-game audio settings on mono - medium quality. And it seems to handle it like a champ running a clean 59-60 fps with no hiccups so far. So I'm blown away with all the performance improvements you've already made!

The only issue I've run into is this https://github.com/andymcca/TempGBA4PSP-mod/issues/27