The scouts of QJ have kept their watchful eye open and thus have come up with the news of a possible emulator for PSP that plays arcade style MAME-like ROMs from Capcom. The reason we say "a possible emulator" is because, at the current time, NJ - the person who is working on the project, has decided to stop because of speed issues that he thinks are insurmountable or at least not worth the effort.

Speed is always the issue with emulators, and with the limited memory of the PSP, this is even more so the case. NJ explains that the PSP has but 20MB to give to game data out of 32MB, with 4MB for the emulator and 8MB for the OS.

Because of this, developers are forced to make their code fit into an ever tighter space; avoiding excess in order to gain and maintain the speed necessary for a good playable game. The bottom line is that NJ tried several different approaches in an attempt to get the emulator to run smoothly and at normal speed but, he always seems to end up with sound problems and or speed issues that ruined gameplay.

It was these recurring problems that eventually caused the original developer, NJ, to stop working on it completely. There were hopes that the source of the project would be released so that it could be taken up by a new team of developers, but it has not happened yet. Fortunately though, the test version of the emulator has been released (just now, hence the delay of this post) so that you can at least try and see how far it has progressed.

UPDATE: The mark of a phenomenal homebrew developer is resilience. Well, the name NJ has became synonymous with that word, and why did we say that? The guy just released the CAPCOM CPS2 Emulator for PSP Test Version 3. According to the good developer, several bugs in large textures were corrected, he also renewed the rominfo.dat. and sound and background issues were somewhat fixed as well. He remains realistic about the challenges of creating a CPS2 Emulator for the PSP. But as far as we can see, the guy seem to not want to give up on the project just yet.


Download: [CPS2 Emulator Test Version 3]