I’ve added a new forum for discussions related to my emulator ports at http://forum.psp.akop.org. I’d like to ask all of you who have suggestions or questions related to any of the emulators to post there - I will not be able to reply to support questions in weblog comments. Random emulator-related discussions are also welcome.

I have spent the last few days (weeks?) rewriting psplib into its successor library, libpl. Most importantly, graphics, font and image rendering core is being rewritten from scratch; it’s already significantly better than the older version. Among changes so far:

• Faster bitmap font rendering (swizzled, VRAM-based fonts)
• More accurate image resizing (no more scissoring artifacts, as most apparent in fMSX PSP)
• Support for multiple pixel formats (instead of fixed 16-bit “5551″ format)

Future plans:

• Support for swizzled images, in-place image swizzling
• Completely new GUI system

Simple “upgrading” to libpl from psplib no longer seems possible; therefore, emulators will have to be largely rewritten to use the new library. Once the work is finished, I also hope to have some sample code available, in case anyone wants to write applications based off the library.

If you’re interested in the progress, you can find semi-nightly builds in the libpl directory, under the trunk branch of the svn repository. No promises on the code actually compiling (or doing anything useful, for that matter)

Many thanks to the ps2dev/psp forum folks for their helpful answers to many of my questions.

I must say I find myself pleasantly surprised by the fan base of the Sinclair Spectrum. Not only has the interest in Fuse PSP been immensely overwhelming since release, but the fans of the system appear to be a hardcore and dedicated bunch. There have been already over 500 downloads from my page alone; I regularly receive suggestions and bug reports (not too many of the latter, thankfully ), and the interest doesn’t seem to fade.

Anyway, it’s great to see a classic system still enjoy popularity decades after its release, and have such dedicated fans.

I finally put together something that was long overdue - an FAQ. Look here first if you have any questions.

Joining the cornucopia of emulators today is a port of the Free Unix Spectrum Emulator (Fuse), a Sinclair Spectrum emulator. A nice addition to the PSP port is support for ZIP files.

I’m happy with most of the port, however, there is an issue with intermittent tape loading hangs that I will be investigating further. To mitigate this issue (and Spectrum’s slow tape loads), I’m (grudgingly, for those of you who remember Caprice32 ) adding support for Z80 files from the game tab. The ‘autoload slot’ feature is also available.

Please check the documentation for any other issues. Feedback is always appreciated!

Download

Shortly after my post about porting OpenTyrian, developer deniska announced in the comments that he’s almost finished with the PSP port, and posted a video on YouTube:

This is a release I’m definitely looking forward to. For those who don’t remember, Tyrian was a beautiful and engaging PC shooter, at a time when PC shooters (as well as most PC games) were subpar to most console titles. The music and graphics in the game are easily on par with many Amiga and MSX titles.

Nice job, deniska!

UPDATE Release is expected Monday

If you’re a site admin and post news about a new or updated emulator release, please link to the weblog article’s permalink (by right-clicking the title and selecting ‘Copy Link Location’) and not to the weblog’s root address (0xff.akop.org). Alternatively, you can link to the page of the emulator directly.

For those who’d like to leave comments or suggestions, please leave them at the weblog. I’m unable to read comments at other sites (there are simply too many).

Thanks!

psp.akop.org, my PSP emulator site has been rewritten in Ruby on Rails (the original version was in PHP). This will significantly reduce time needed to update the site, as almost everything is now automated (even documentation is generated on-the-fly from the database).

The previous version was also database-driven, but changes to the database were done by hand.

The original RSS feed that was used to supply news on new and updated emulators will no longer be updated, and will eventually be taken offline. To keep up with the latest developments, subscribe to the weblog’s RSS feed. Additionally, each emulator now has a separate RSS feed that will be automatically updated each time a new version of the emulator is released.