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TempGBA4PSP - New Build

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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.... ^~^
 
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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.
 
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Jon the Savage said:
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.... ^~^
Click to expand...
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:

johnlikespsp said:
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.
Click to expand...
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.
 
Last edited by leapster,
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
 
thank you so much for your hard work!I'm speechless with gratitude,dude! FF6 mod work fine now!

Maybe you already know or not, we have some methods to deal with the Media Engine now.Hope it works.
Exnor

Hardware  Thread 'Unlocking the PSP’s Dual Core setup.'

So the PSP is actually a multi-core system. Very interesting.

Here's a snippet of the article:

Knowledge of the PSP’s second MIPS core, ME, wasn’t exactly 100% a secret, ancient devs of the PSP scene (such as crazyc from ps2dev forums) had already done much tinkering, enough to execute code, but with several limitations due to lack of new discoveries such as a hardware spinlock. These new discoveries have been converted into convenient libraries and lots of very technical documentation that I will be linking at the end of the article for those curious enough.


In the world of...
Click to expand...
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BTW,I'm into Fire Emblem: Andaron Saga recently.S&L trick may save you a lot of time.I wonder if you can add the function to make quick save at the ram ? In this way you never bother to care about which savedata should keep or cover.Thanks again for your wonderful job!
 
Last edited by oceanco,
Hey guys,I'm kinda new to this emulator thing ahah, and I've tried 3 different emulators for the past hour and none of them is willing to work.

So right now I have downloaded the latest version/build of TempGBA and have put all the roms inside the "roms' folder and when I open the emulator it shows all my games,but when I try to play it just doesn't work and the "square" button also doesn't work (actually it doesn't work in any other emulator either)

And when I go back from the Emulator menu by pressing "L" all games dissapear

Any help ?

PSP 2000 with 6.61 Infinity
 
i saw someone from reddit posted a patch for the exact issue described here for unbound and hns v2 and was just about to burst in here all excited when i realized it was you LMAO. are you still working on some optimizations? i saw there was a v2 for unbound

from the post:
This is an IPS / BPS Patch for the GBA ROM file to address audio/slowdown issues when running this ROM Hack on low-spec hardware and emulator combinations such as -

Sony PSP - TempGBA4PSP/FrogGBA/ToadGBA/gpsp-kai etc
SF2000/GB300 - gpsp
Powkiddy V90 - lr-gpsp
Leapster Explorer - lr-gpsp
Others

It works by patching the Ipatix HQ audio engine to remove the heavy Self Modifying Code (SMC) aspects and replace them with separate audio code and data. This massively reduces the number of times the Dynamic Recompiler in gpsp variants has to clear its cache per frame.
Click to expand...
 
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@je
Jon the Savage said:
i saw someone from reddit posted a patch for the exact issue described here for unbound and hns v2 and was just about to burst in here all excited when i realized it was you LMAO. are you still working on some optimizations? i saw there was a v2 for unbound

from the post:
Click to expand...
Haha! Yes it was me 😂

The v0.2 patch I've done should be 'it' because it addresses both the audio and hblank issues as much as we can in the ROM. Other Pokemon ROM Hacks have one or both issues, so I will probably do more patches for those as it's easy enough now I have the source for the fixes

HnS stays at v0.1 because it doesn't have the HBLANK bug (Fire Red derived ones do, Emerald ones do not)
 
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New release of TempGBA4PSP-Mod (GBA Emulator) - https://github.com/andymcca/TempGBA4PSP-mod/releases/tag/20260921

Few bugs fixed, been busy but finally managed to get time to pull this together and release!

Resume from PSP Sleep fixed
Auto Savestates fixed (would ask whether you wanted to load and then would shut down the emulator!)
IWRAM Stack fix (means Pokemon Heart & Soul 2.0.2 works now in Partial Flush dynarec modes)
Japanese/Chinese Language Fixes

Also, check out my Pokemon ROM Hacks Audio Patcher which makes certain ROM Hacks run a lot better on slower platforms like the PSP - https://gbatemp.net/threads/pokemon-rom-hacks-audio-patcher-for-unbound-etc.684550/#post-10910589
 
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im testing new release with golden sun 2 and auto savestates doesn't work
once I click "yes" (to load auto-savestate) it freezes psp

edit:
meanhile on previous release (20260921):
- golden sun 2 (not working - psp freezes completly)
- ff6 (working fine)

In new release (20261009)
- golden sun 2 (not working - psp freezes completly)
- ff6 (not working, but doesn't freeze completly either. Screen just acts weird, blinks, shows some pixels from game and it's possible to quit emu)
 
Last edited by C4thie,
C4thie said:
im testing new release with golden sun 2 and auto savestates doesn't work
once I click "yes" (to load auto-savestate) it freezes psp

edit:
meanhile on previous release (20260921):
- golden sun 2 (not working - psp freezes completly)
- ff6 (working fine)

In new release (20261009)
- golden sun 2 (not working - psp freezes completly)
- ff6 (not working, but doesn't freeze completly either. Screen just acts weird, blinks, shows some pixels from game and it's possible to quit emu)
Click to expand...
I can't reproduce these. Are you using a genuine gba_bios.bin file? Can you try removing global and game specific config files? Also can u share emulator settings?
 
leapster said:
I can't reproduce these. Are you using a genuine gba_bios.bin file? Can you try removing global and game specific config files? Also can u share emulator settings?
Click to expand...
Here is what I do:

- Download last release (20261009)

- create folder folder_boxart and add these two lines (about boxart) in dir.ini

- add bios file (i took it from https://github.com/GrabowskiDev/TempGBA4PSP-Single-game ) I can try with my own bios file, however I must find it first, but I guess bios included in GrabowskiDev version should be fine? )

- add rom of Golden Sun 2 (the lost age) into "roms".

- upload it on psp: PSP/GAME/04Emulators/here

- run tempgba on psp.

- run golden sun the lost age - not changing anything - all settings default

- play for a sec, and then exit tempgba - open again - popup appears (yes/no) i click yes - then memory card diode blinks once and that's it - nothing else happens.

--------

btw, if i try to load this autosave manually (from emu options) its working. Only trying to load it from this first pop-up is problematic

--------

Its psp 2000, 6.61 pro-c

--------

Edit:
I tried with original memory stick pro duo (not adapter) - same problem
 
Last edited by C4thie,

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