Homebrew coders Sleepper, M@x and the rest of the dev team has released the final version PSPKVM v0.5.4, a port of SUN's phoneME Feature that enables MIDP/JavaME applications to run on the PSP. The latest version has added tons of improvements and various bug fixes.


Download: PSPKVM v0.5.4 (final)

If you've ever used Jackson Mo's uClinux PSP port, then you might want to take a gander at this app. It's called pspux and is a pre-built Linux toolcahin for the PSP based on uClinux 2.6.22-uc1.

Going over StrmnNrmn's blog, we found out that he has posted a short weekend update about Daedalus R10. The update may be measly for some, but heck, we'll take it anyway: better than no updates at all.

Anyhow, he mentions that he hasn't managed to put up as many updates as he wants since he's been busy with work, but then again, here goes his short weekend Daedalus update.

He said that he has started taking a look at the list of potential optimizations that he listed and for now, he is trying to figure out what to tackle first. He continued by saying that the first thing he'll be doing is tweaking the Daedalus' profiler "to try and figure out where the biggest wins are going to come from." Hopefully, he'll live up to his promise to update us with some interesting findings this weekend.

Aside from that, he also spent some time looking at converting "the source control I'm using at sourceforge from CVS to Subversion." He then said that:

I've been meaning to do this for some time. I've never really been a fan of CVS, and as I'm using Subversion for other projects at work and at home I thought it made sense to migrate Daedalus over too...With CVS I usually only updated the source alongside every release. Ideally the repository would contain an up-to-date copy of my local build, but I've had problems in the past where people have distributed 'intermediate' builds of Daedalus PSP, bugs and all.

I only ever release new builds when I think there are enough new features and its stable enough to make it worthwhile for people to download and install; updating a source a bit less frequently gives me a bit more control and helps prevent everyone's time being wasted with intermediate builds. I think that I'm going to continue with this policy for the time being. We'll see how it goes.

So there it is. Check out StrmnNrmn's blog via our link below, for now, we'll be waiting until the next weekend to get our hands on some Daedalus R10 updates.

If you've ever wanted to play volleyball on your PSP, then goebish's year-ender submission to the forums, PSP Volley, is for you! It's intended to be a blobby volley clone - not a port, since while goebish used the gfx's from the blobby volley 2 sourceforge project, the game code's entirely all his blood, sweat, and tears.

He labels this game as a beta 0.2. It's fully playable; the game rules are in place, complete with jigglypuff AI, no worries there. He just wasn't able to implement a scoreboard - having lost the code, he'll have to reconstruct for a future update -  but you can always keep a manual score and not lie about being beat by a blob of jelly whom you've named Loco.

Basic controls are simple: D-left/right to move blob, X to jump, L and R to decrease and increase game speed. Start - NOT SELECT, but START - exits to XBM. Like the guy said, it was an unfinished game.

Installation:

• 1.5 firmware: copy the content of the 1.5 folder into your PSP/GAME folder
• 1.0, 2.71SE and 3.02OE: copy the content of the 1.0 folder into your PSP/GAME or PSP/GAME150 folder depending of your fw settings.

Download: [PSP Volley beta 0.2]
Discuss: [Forum Discussion Thread]

StrmnNrmn has posted news about his progress with the Daedalus N64 Emulator on the PSP. According to his blog he updated the project CVS repository, but he is not quite ready to release a new binary yet (still a few more optimizations and various bugs to fix first) and will try to release it within the coming week.

Incidentally, updating the source normally only takes 20 minutes or so, but it took a good couple of hours tonight. Sourceforge updated their CVS service recently (May 12th) and as a result I had to spend a couple of hours updating WinCVS, generating new SSH keys and the like. Hopefully it won't be so painful next time around, or I might just lose the will to live.

As a more general update, I cleared a couple of things from my TODO list sorted this weekend. I'm caching floating point registers for most of the single-precision Cop1 instructions, which are now implemented directly in the dynarec code. I've not timed this in depth yet, but it's shaving 10-20ms/frame off the intro to Mario 64 (Mario's Head), which is particularly FPU heavy (i.e. I'm getting ~160ms/frame rather than ~180ms)

Finally I need to have a good think about how to go about optimising the double-precision floating point performance. As the PSP doesn't have hardware support for double precision floating point this is currently very expensive (i.e. adding 2 doubles on the n64 takes just one instruction - on the psp this balloons to several hundred as it all has to be done in software).

It is good to see that the Nintendo 64 emulator is being worked on and hopefully will continue to be updated until it is perfect. Well that is the news about Daedalus for now when more information becomes available we'll be sure let you know. You can check out the changes to the source by visiting StrmnNrmn's CVS section of Sourceforge.