Buying A Psp

[dave19711998]

I think sometimes we don't realise how well off we are and how lucky we are to have a machine that offers so much for so little.

I'll tell you a little story about myself, looking into buying a psp. I wanted to buy a psp and looked at all the magazines. Great 3d games (not bad), you can pay more for films on UMD format than DVD (RIGHT) but where are all the emulation games?

So I decided to sell my GP32 and buy a GP2x. Why? It's simple, I love old emulation games. Some of the best games I have played recently has been home grown. For me there is some about a game made by someone who has poured his or her heart and soul into it and I don't think the PSP will ever really be able to offer me the same experience.

Just to give you an idea of what I currently own. I have a PSX, PS2, 2x Dreamcasts, Gamecube and 7 PCs but none of them gave me the joy of running black tiger on mame, on a hand held console.

Also, i find the quirks of the console challenging and for me, there's a sense of achievement in getting something to work that didn't work before.

I have not tried playing music on the machine, I have a 40 gig MP3 player for that but for movies, I would recomend anyone using POCKETDIVX. It's free and can convert a movie or a batch of movies in a short amount of time. There is no slow down and depending on the size of the original can reduce a film. I.E. The Matrix is about 260 MB with a decent picture and sterio sound at 128KBs and in my opinion is great.

I start to wonder how empty my experience would have been if I had bought a PSP and thank god I didn't.

Hope you enjoyed my little write up of a machine that in all fairness should be selling millions.

Also for all those individuals who complain about the poor performances of this little machine. I remember The PC back in the late 90s when most of the emulators didn't work properly and in some cases took a couple of years before they became stable, some still aren't stable after fours or five years and may never be and that with a rediculous amout of resources to run them.

In the last three days alone the gameboy emulator has gone from requiring a UNIX script to run the game to a GUI and that is unpresidented on any system, let alone the fact that the person is doing it out of the goodness of their heart. I say go out and buy one. I must admit, I am also thinking of also buy a gameboy Ds.

 

[Trashman]

Nice post. Exactley the same reason I chose the 2x after looking at a psp. I didnt know about gp32 or gp2x until I read an advert in retro gamer. A cool magazine by the way. Id allways had a love for emulators, reliving my speccy and c64 days. And being able to put movies on an sd card is so easy and cool for those "Oooh, whats that?" moments at work.
Chow fer now. B)

 

[Rico]

The other consoles (barring homebrew) generally lock you into their games and once you're bored of them, your PSP turns into a paperweight. The GP consoles are open and will keep going much longer after they stop being sold.

 

[TelcoLou]

The other consoles (barring homebrew) generally lock you into their games and once you're bored of them, your PSP turns into a paperweight. The GP consoles are open and will keep going much longer after they stop being sold.

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SO true. I feel pangs of guilt though; it's become one damn expensive paperweight at this point ... A buddy of mine not 10 minutes ago, showed me a PSP media manager program he got that easily converts several different video formats into AVC; easy drag & drop functionality, etc ...

It took a HUGE effort from me to pause my game of Tempest Tubes to look at his home movie he converted and put on his PSP :lol:

 

[Mr Doctor]

I'll tell you a little story about myself, looking into buying a psp. I wanted to buy a psp and looked at all the magazines. Great 3d games (not bad), you can pay more for films on UMD format than DVD (RIGHT) but where are all the emulation games?

Erm,, everywhere? Theres loads of amazing emulators on the PSP. NeoCD, DGen and Castaway especially! All perfect, even snes is brilliant for rpgs since at fs3 its close to full speed and on rpgs you dont notice it much.

PSP has much more going for it in its current state than the GP2X will have for probably the next 3-4 months at least, especially with fanjitas work in cracking all firmwares. Hell, if you are just an end user and not deving you shouldnt even have a 2X now

People round here sound like a broken record with their PSP bashing, like the 2X dosnt need bashing!

GP2X -
Cons: unreliable as hell, shit joystick, many many many firmware bugs that sometimes they cant even update properly - scanlines, iffy build quality. FANBOYS.... and GPH
Pros: get better with age, TV Out, (somewhat ) open source

PSP -
Cons: ghosting on an otherwise fabulous screen fucks it, crap DPad, more expensive memsticks, limited media playback formats (although thats already been taken out on 1.5s with the divx player). Sony trying (and failing) to squash the homebrew scene. FANBOYS..... and Sony.
Pros: beautiful screen when nothings moving too fast, very stable (for both homebrew and retail), the nub is pretty good once you get used to it. High quality retail games (well, theres about 2, but theres some good stuff looming on the horizon)

If I truely had to pick one other the other to buy, it would be the PSP by a mile because it offers much more right now and is far more reliable. Both have major hardware problems.

The other consoles (barring homebrew) generally lock you into their games and once you're bored of them, your PSP turns into a paperweight. The GP consoles are open and will keep going much longer after they stop being sold.

That makes so much sense because the GP2X is ONLY homebrew! (the rubbish looking retail games comming for it may as well be homebrew by the look of them) So with others you get big games AND homebrew, so you cant make a statement like that and "bar" homebrew.

 

[subin]

you know, i was seriously considering a psp.. but apparently the emulators and such for it are a bit difficult to install, and making the firmware so you can run it is even more risky than on gp2x. and then if you do brick it, sony aren't going to do anything about it.

besides, a psp is what every man and his dog wants, but who's heard of a gp2x? no ones going to mug me so they can play metal slug. but i bet they would if they could play "midnight club 2" or something.

 

[Mr Doctor]

you know, i was seriously considering a psp.. but apparently the emulators and such for it are a bit difficult to install, and making the firmware so you can run it is even more risky than on gp2x. and then if you do brick it, sony aren't going to do anything about it.

Sony are the ones *stopping* it. But you dont need to mess with firmwares for homebrew, just piracy. You can only pirate games on 1.0 and 1.5. 90% of all homebrew runs on 2.0 now thanks to fanjitas amazing loader, and now you can run homebrew on 2.01/2.5/2.6 if you own GTA because of an exploit in its save system. Right now its only tetris that really works via that method, but fanjitas in the middle of getting his loader working the GTA way... and since the GTA explout is hardcoded into the GTA UMD, its doubtful that it will be an exploit that sony can ever close (without re-releasing GTA)

 

[Rayek]

I kind of agree with you, Mr. Doctor. And until I learned about the GP32 and the 2X, the PSP sounded awesome to me. That's why I bought one. Honestly, out of innocence, I bought one with the sad illusion that I could play SNES and MegaDrive on it. But then I found out about the whole firmware patch ordeal, how rolling back the firmware is extremely complex and dodgy, how every game I've played on it makes me feel a little bit cheated (except Namco Museum, and yes, even GTA was a little crap), and how I really couldn't have afforded it, both when I bought it, and to continue to purchase things for it.

Sony is miles worse in my opinion than GPH because they're actively trying to sqash homebrew as if they were the Mexican governement trying to squash small communes. And, even if GPH (Or whoever) gets sued for not releasing the source, they'll still be better than Sony who is not even trying to give people what they want.

And, Mr.Doctor, you have to realize that the PSP is not BOTH commercial games AND homeberew. Yes, you definitely have a choice between the two, but games are now coming out with unavoidable firmware updates which make homebrew impossible unless you want to roll back the firmware every time you want to play some SNES.

I sold my PSP for this reason (and because it WAS collecting dust) for a GP2X. The GP2X is still the fastest evolving video game console right now (and probably ever), and in a month it is forseeable that almost ALL of the cons you listed COULD possibly be vaporized, what, with new firmware, emulators, developments and homebrew coming out nearly daily, and stick mods, not to mention the release of the coveted source. Sony's PSP problems will NEVER be fixed. Try telling a huge company that homebrew and emulators, things that could make them lose money in their eyes is a good thing. And anyway, most of the PSP cons are hardware based, and can't be fixed; like ghosting and Mem pro usage.

I know I'll be labeled a fanboy, but for what I want to use the system in question for, the PSP is obviously the wrong way to go. I'm pretty sure that anyone you label as a 'fanboy' will be saying just that. I agree that a simple "psP is maad sux0rz!1!!!11!1! 2x all da way foo. i'm out." is a telltale sign, but how many of those do we see here?

 

[Rayek]

totally missed the exploit... sry. all my points aren't valid. i'm going to wipe the dust off my friends psp now...

 

[Mr Doctor]

http://www.fanjita.org/ for the 2.0 exploit loader with a list of all compatible firmware (and hopefully soon, a 2.01+ loader).

I'm staying 1.5 though, hoping the firmware emulator that a couple of teams are working on pans out (and I like to run games(I own) as ISOs because it reduces load time and means I can have 3-4 with me at a time as well as emulators)

 

[subin]

totally missed the exploit... sry. all my points aren't valid. i'm going to wipe the dust off my friends psp now...

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haha.. biggest argument backtrack ever? maybe.

 

[Rayek]

WOW. That will definitely keep me busy until my gp2x comes! Very nice, though the emulators aren't quite prime quality, but whatever. I found a really nice genesis emulator... I'm sure not as good as DrMDX, but still at least I can play Mortal Kombat 3 for now...

 

[Lodis]

WOW. That will definitely keep me busy until my gp2x comes! Very nice, though the emulators aren't quite prime quality, but whatever. I found a really nice genesis emulator... I'm sure not as good as DrMDX, but still at least I can play Mortal Kombat 3 for now...

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There is a Psp emulator called Dgen and it is just as good as DrMDX, version 1.20 will run on 1.5 firmware and version 1.10C will run on v2.0 firmware. The emulators are more than prime quality and in their current state some are excellent (with the right versions and settings). The Psx emulator Alpha Demo that was released today also runs under 2.0 firmware!!

For example, if you run Snes9x, you will find it is much slower than for example Snes TYL 0.2C because the TYL versions make use of the Psp GPU 3D hardware as well as having options for Mode 7 and various speed hacks. There is a frame limit setting in Snes TYL for a reason!!

As for the firmware updates being forced by Sony / games, under 2.0 firmware it is well known that you can now play games that ask for 2.5 firmware by using Pspsetx to fake the firmware version to 2.5.

Once this has been done (one time) you can simply leave it like this as I have done. This leaves you with a very big library of commercial games as well as a very good library of emulation and homebrew.

Apart from Snes one of the most impressive emulators that also runs under 2.0 firmware is NeoCD, it can run some games at frame skip 0-1 at 266mhz and still be playable and it has the fastest zip support I have ever seen of compressed large files. Scummvm is also very impressive and runs under 2.0 making use of the Psp analogue stick for movement in the menus, I run this at 222mhz and it appears full speed and is near perfect!!

I have to say I am a little dissapointed with my GP2X but I will give it a chance to mature and see what happens.

It is easy to get spoiled by the current high quality of Psp emulation but one must remember it has had alot of time to mature. When you consider the Psp is not even open source though, I am amased the emulation scene has matured to this high level. Even the GBA emulator that currently only runs on 1.5 firmware is pretty decent, 2 games I know of even run full speed although the sound is best left disabled.

EDIT: On these forums I read about a Snes game called Yoshi's Island and some mentioned that it used a special Snes FX chip, was difficult to run at a decent frame rate on emulators, was very processor intensive and some considered it a good bench mark for Snes emulators performance. After hearing this I decided to try this game out on the Psp Snes emulator TYL version. I am happy to say it is very playable at frame skip 2, sound at 22khz and Vsync off. Further tweaking of speed hacks etc will produce better results.

 

[dennis20014]

I was actually going to buy a psp also this past xmas but the lack of good games, and the higher prices (both the hardware and the memory sticks) are just too much for me at this moment. I seen the gp32 along time ago and wanted one again, and then boom they come out with the gp2x and I got it.

A few friends of mine have psp's and they rarely play them, there collectin dust too. And I definatly get, "ooo whats that?" when I show off movies playing, and all that hooey

 

[Mr Doctor]

One biggy about PSP emulation is that homebrew is starting to incorporate wifi libs into them, so I'm hoping in the next few months me and my mate will be playing Chaos Engine and Metal Slug together

 

[PSyMastR]

I must admit, I am also thinking of also buy a gameboy Ds.

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Nintendo DS, not Gameboy DS. Its not in the Gameboy line of products.