Recipe for good humour

I know I have written recently that I want ZX Spectrum emulator for my iPhone. Indeed I do, but out of the blue I was struck by other emulator that I also wanted to see and I fell in love with my iPhone even more. Just look at this video :

Then combine it with the following list. Add this news. Result? Silly smile glued to my face all day long.


Yes, it all means in just a couple of days I will be able to play Final Fantasy VI in its first original version on my jail-breaked 1.1.3 iPhone. SNES, FTW! (Sorry, couldn't help it.)

It also means that I will have to finally write a note about Final Fantasy VI. I have intended to do this for quite some time, last occasion being a port of FF6 to Gameboy Advance (some time early last year). I have actually bought GBA to play this game, got disgusted by the quality of the port and sold it later. Nevertheless, I consider sixth part of the series to be on par with Final Fantasy VII when it comes to the story and characters.

So right now I am biting my nails, waiting impatiently for a public release. Hurry up, guys!

Gaming on iPhone

Yes, we all know that iPhone is cool and all, but the very first question every true gamer should ask is "Are there any games on it?". (I admit that my first thought I've had when I first heard about running unofficial code on it was "I wonder if I there will be ZX Spectrum emulator for iPhone?", but we all know I'm a freak.)

I didn't check gaming prospects right after buying the damn gadget, because I was too busy with jailbreaking and hacking SIM (umm, yes, there were problems). Also, my non-digital life was pretty busy, so the guilty pleasure of gaming unfortunately had to wait.

Finally, I have now investigated the subject and I am pleased to announce that the situation is better then I expected, even though there is no ZX Spectrum... ahem. So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, the situation is as follows :

• we have a port of Doom that is supposedly nearly playable in widescreen, if you trust YouTube video that is
• we have a NES emulator that I don't really give a damn about since Contra is unplayable on touchscreen (but hey, for showing off it is good enough)
• we have a SCUMMVM port that might allow me to finally finish Day of the Tentacle
• we have a PSX emulator that is molasses slow and probably will never reach playable speed (but if I'm wrong, I will be very happy)
• we have some wicked physics game that looks intriguing (in fact it is just a port of Crayon Physics)
• and, last but not least, we have a quite good Gameboy Advance emulator!

Final Fantasy Tactics

The last one is my grand favourite so far. There are still glitches, speed needs improvement, some games are not emulated - but heck, being able to play Final Fantasy Tactics on my damn cellphone makes up for all of it.

Arcade games won't ever be the same experience, because touchscreen makes it impossible to have the same reactivity level as on the regular pad and buttons combo. This is what makes NES emulator so crappy (though I appreciate the effort). Gameboy Advance, however, has a large library of premium RPG and strategy games that don't require that fast reaction time and allow for accidental pressing of wrong direction button. Advance Wars, Final Fantasy Tactics, Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy IV, V, VI... It's a pity that Golden Sun doesn't work yet, but hey, it's just the beginning.

Advance Wars

Although there is still room for improvement, I am fairly certain that the successive updates will bring this emulator into near-perfection. After all, when GBA emulation begun on PSP, it was much worse in the beginning, but then became full-fledged emulator. And iPhone has more processing power onboard, even if it doesn't have dedicated graphics unit, so the chances are we will be seeing solid improvements relatively soon.

Now, about that ZX Spectrum emulator port?...

Little wishes come true - in green

In my last post about PSPCAP32 and Amstrad Schneider CPC I mentioned that probably the only thing that might make this program a little more perfect was the monochrome display option, just like on the old green monitors.


And voila! Christmas is approaching and my wish was granted! Zx-81, the man behind porting of this emulator (and a handful of others, too) to PSP, heard my cries and added this feature to the newest release, which, by the way, happened just a couple of days after the last one. That's what you call support!


So thanks to Zx-81 you can now see these games the way I have experienced them for the first time. For me it is yet another trip down the memory lane, for younger readers unique opportunity to see how gaming used to be long time ago. I bet there are one or two other guys out there who have just shed a tear of nostalgia as well. At least I hope so, otherwise this means I am really weird.


Oh, and if you were able to tell the name of the above games based on the screenshots, you're a geek over thirty.

Answer : Knight Lore, Fruity Frank, Boulder Dash.

Amstrad CPC on PSP

Long time before I actually got my first personal computer (we would call them microcomputers back then), which would be ZX Spectrum+, my sole contact with the emerging computer science would be to implore my Dad to take me to his work, where his friend, Mariusz Smoczyński, worked on Amstrad Schneider CPC 6128. Thus begins the tale of my digital fascination, born in the green light of the monochrome screen in the 8-bit times.

Fruity Frank - in that innocent times people were
not afraid to give such name to the game...

A little anecdote here. Many years later, when I was still a student at the Technical University of Lodz and had laboratory classes in one of too many laboratories where time has stopped, we were supposed to calculate some viscosity coefficients using ... Amstrad CPC with a prepared and preloaded program. I was the only one who knew machine, so after we had finished our task, I broke the program and wrote some simple animation in Basic that would scroll our names on the screen instead of boring program. Boy, was that nerdy, but you can't beat that feeling.

Ghosts'n'Goblins - there even exists a PSP remake now.
History has made a full circle.

It is therefore understandable that I have a special place in my heart for this machine, like some have for their first girlfriend. Fortunately, the development of everything digital has allowed me to have it in my pocket, more precisely on my trustworthy PSP.

The emulator that allows me to relive my childhood adventures in other worlds is called PSPCAP32 and it's author Zx-81 has just recently released yet another version that has transformed it from a very good emulator into a perfect one.

PSPCAP interface

The emulator runs very fluidly (50fps), has nice interface, is very configurable and user-friendly. It is enough to select a disk with a game (speaking of which - all Amstrad games are legally free) and the game will load automatically. I have not yet found any game that would be incompatible. They are just like I have remembered them and I am flooded with nostalgia (if you have read Barts' News for some time, you already know I have a soft spot for good, old times.).

Green Beret - one of the hardest games back in the day

The only thing I could think of in terms of features I would like to see would be to implement some filter to make the games monochrome, as seen on the green monitors back then. But this is a very bizarre request, stemming from the fact that I played these games this way. Apart from that, PSPCAP provides the ultimate Amstrad experience on the go. Thank you Zx-81!

Emulating Amiga on PSP with PSPUAE 0.63

One of my earliest posts on this blog was about PSPUAE, the Amiga emulator on PSP. Being an avid Amiga fan since childhood, I bought PSP fueled by the desire to play Amiga games on the go. Unfortunately, the reality was not that great back then, which made me somewhat bitter and unpleasant (read here to find out more).

Anyhow, just recently I have got my hands on the newest version of PSPUAE, namely 0.63 nicknamed "Birthday Edition". Happy birthday, PSPUAE!


Right, and now to the essentials: it certainly is nice, but how does it play?

The answer to that is : really good. One year has passed and it was not wasted. There's a lot of things that have changed since I first got a copy of PSPUAE

Most importantly, the authors have significantly improved the speed of emulation with this edition. Although still not sufficient to fully emulate every game in perfect fluidity, PSPUAE definitely has made progress. Many games are emulated almost perfectly, and many more have accelerated and crossed over a threshold from barely playable to playable.

The usability has also improved, in terms of user interface and the customization options available. The menu is more user friendly and I had no problem finding the options I needed.

Another important feature is the use of so called save-states. They allow for loading the state of Amiga memory directly in the emulator, instead of emulating the regular loading process from a fake drive - thus allowing for much faster loading times. It sounds a little complicated, but it boils down to being able to start playing without having to wait for a long time. Certainly a nice feature.

In order to use the emulator, user needs to have KickStart files. Due to copyright issues they are not distributed with the emulator, but they can be found on Google. The emulator itself can be downloaded from a couple of places, such us QJ.Net or its homepage.

A couple of examples of test scenarios (what a nice euphemism for playing games) is presented below :

International Karate Plus - plays great with sound and a little amount of frameskip. Fluid and playable.

WarZone - slight slowdowns, but playable with sound.

Speedball Deluxe - runs smoothly with sound. Impeccable.

SWIV - unfortunately not really playable. Sluggish even with frameskip, less so with no sound.

Another World - no problems here, runs great with sound and music.

My beloved Wolfchild also loads and plays great, with sound and decent framerate, although some frameskipping is necessary. But it finally plays fluidly!

To sum up, this is a very good release of a very good emulator. I hope for some more improvements, but given the complexity of task, I must say I appreciate what we already have. If you have a PSP, this one is a must.

NeoGeo on PSP

I never actually owned a NeoGeo console, nor did I play on it. However, I happened to have played Samurai Showdown and other cult classics in the arcade lounges in the south (Zakopane) , north (Karwia) and middle (Łódź, Warszawa) of Poland, leaving a trail of my parents' hard-earned coins behind me. Another fond memory of my childhood is reading about NeoGeo games in foreign game magazines - in the early nineties, those were like glimpses of a better world.

Therefore it comes as no surprise that when I have learnt about possibility of emulating NeoGeo on my PC, I started playing it immediately. King of Fighters series, Garou : Mark of the Wolves, Samurai Showdown, Metal Slug, Ninja Masters... I could name all heroes from these games, I would know the twists of storylines, I finished many of hem with different characters, achieved bonuses and became master fighter in some of them - briefly, I was in love.


No wonder that when I have heard about emulating NeoGeo on PSP, I was sold from the very beginning. After all, at the beginning the main thing about PSP for me was all the homebrew emulators and other programs (eventually, I would notice that there are some great commercial games for the system as well).

The best NeoGeo emulator for the PSP is definitively MVSPSP by coder NJ. It runs smoothly at 60fps, games are emulated accurately, there is a nice and functional user interface present, games load really fast. Its main disadvantage is the need to prepare so called cache. Basically, you need to convert regular zip files to something more "digestible" for the emulator, using the attached converter. This can be a minor annoyance at first, but when you get it done, the emulator works like a charm.

I tested in on a couple of my old time favourites (Last Blade, Samurai Showdown, Metal Slug) and also on King of Fighters 2003, which I haven't had the opportunity to play yet. Everything was smooth and impeccable and games look great on PSP crisp screen (plus player can chose whether they prefer stretched 16:9 format or regular 4:3 one). So far the emulator turned out to be working flawlessly.


Unfortunately, PSP digital pad and/or analogue pad (because there is option to customize controls) are somehow not very fit to pulling out some of the more complicated moves, which makes playing some of those games significantly harder. But this is not really the fault of the emulator, since I had the same impression when playing Dark Stalkers and Guilty Gear on PSP.

A very important feature of MVSPSP is an option to have two player mode via Ad Hoc mode. Thanks to my colleague Adrian, who kindly borrowed me his PSP, I was able to try that out. I have downloaded dedicated Ad Hoc version (which also works fine for single player, so I really don't understand the logic behind splitting the emulator into two versions) and tried to play the game on two PSP. And then surprise - I was totally unable to either make PSPs see each other or find any Ad Hoc parameter in options. It took me some googling, but I have finally found the answer, translating the Japanese instructions :

AdHoc時
ファイルブラウザで□(Square)でゲームを選択するとAdHocモードで
ームを起動します。

which, courtesy of Babelfish, became :

When at the time of AdHoc the □(Square) with the game is selected with the file browser, the game is started with AdHoc mode.

So finally, the procedure is the following :

• Download the dedicated Ad Hoc version (from QJ.net or from NJ's page).
• Convert the games using the converter and place the files in the correct directories. You can use them with both regular and Ad Hoc version later on.
• Find NeoGeo BIOS file and put it in Roms directory (Google is your friend).
• Set your connection to Ad Hoc in the Networking menu of your PSP.
• Run the emulator - on OE firmwares, you may need to put it into GAME folder (instead of GAME150) in order to work.
• Important step! Instead of running the game by pressing O (Circle) button, run it by pressing [] (Square) button (on both consoles).
• One PSP will be a master and the second one will be a slave. Chose the server on the slave PSP, accept incoming request on the master PSP and enjoy playing the game versus your friend.

I suppose this should also apply to CPS2PSP and CPS1PSP, since user interface is the same in both cases. I didn't have the time to confirm this, though.

There also exists a version of the emulator, called NCDZPSP, that will allow you to play your NeoGeoCD games. These are few and far between, but I have tested it on Last Blade CD edition and it worked great, just like its cousin. Sixty frames per second, nice interface, and the additional bonus of not having to painfully create games' cache. The game music is stored in MP3 format, so you can in fact remove it and gain some space, but that's taking away the whole beauty of using CD versions - after all, Last Blade's score sounds great in high quality.

To sum up, this is an exemplary piece of homebrew : polished, user-friendly, fast, functional. If only all homebrew programs could be like this one...

Toshiba versus Linux

As I wrote previously, I am going to States for a business trip. It will be six weeks and I will have only my company laptop (which also doubles as developer's machine) with me. Since company policy is rather strict when it comes to non-work related software installed on it (especially games and communicators, both of which hurts me), I thought I would need a second system.

The most obvious choice would be some sort of Linux booted from USB pendrive, which is much more convenient then using some live distribution from a CD. My laptop is Toshiba Tecra M3 (with lots of goodies, including Nvidia FX 6x00 graphic chip and 2Gb of RAM) so I thought that being new hardware it would have no problems booting from a pendrive. I was wrong.

After going through huge number of webpages (I include the best ones at the end of this post) and experimenting with different approaches, I still couldn't make my laptop boot from USB stick. I tried HP Format Utility, I tried syslinux, I tried solutions from PendriveLinux, I tried different distros, I meddled with BIOS and boot menu... Nothing would work.

So finally I have sticked to a combination of two distributions and different modes of running them.

One is the embedded version of Damn Small Linux, run under QEMU directly from Windows. The downside is that there is no hardware acceleration (no Enemy Territory for me), it doesn't run too smooth and also it is physically located on the laptop's hard drive. Still, as I work a lot with coding under Linux, I can always claim it is there on purpose and nobody is going to look too closely. My web browsing will be a tad more secure and also as an additional bonus it will allow me easier use of PSPSDK (instead of using Cygwin, which, frankly, is getting on my nerves sometimes).

My desktop computer running embedded DSL.

The second option is Slax Linux, the so-called Kill Bill edition (including Wine and Dosbox, hence the name), which I installed on my USB and boot it using a dedicated Slax Boot CD that runs the distribution from the pendrive. Perhaps not the most elegant solution, but at least it is the one that works. It eliminates all the disadvantages of using Live distributions, allows installing of Nvidia drivers (Enemy Territory), as well as ensures higher security and confidentiality.


The third option that I have stumbled upon while searching for the information would be to buy a USB pendrive using U3 technology. It looks really great and I probably will be tempted to try it (I have even registered as a U3 developer to be able to toy with its SDK), but I already had bought my USB stick when I first heard about U3. It allows quite confidential use of your favourite programs, even if in a limited way. Still, too late for me.

As promised, below you will find pages I considered useful in the task of setting USB Linux (pity they didn't help finally, but apparently for some people it works, so...) :

- Run GNU/Linux from USB pen
- USB pendrives and Linux
- Forum thread on booting Slax from USB
- Quite illegal approach on USB Linux using Hiren's Boot CD
- HowTo on booting Quantian from a USB memory device
- Polish forum thread on running DSL from USB
- How to boot from USB flash drive

Of course, if you accidentally happen to know how to do it or would like to point out that I missed something, please let me know (even via anonymous comment, if you prefer). I would really be happy to post a HowTo on booting Linux directly from USB drive on Toshiba Tecra.

Say hi to 3.02OE-B

As promised in the previous post, I spent this day upgrading my PSP's firmware to the newest and coolest one by Dark_Alex - namely 3.02OE-B - and playing with PSX (or PS1) emulation.

It took me some time, because first of all I needed to find all the appropriate files (no brickers, please), read HowTos and testimonials on forums to know what I'm doing, then I continued with converting my Final Fantasy VII isos to PBP format readable by Pops (the PSX emulator found in the 3.02 firmware), only to spend another hours struggling with YouTube and my camera (the result can be seen below).

There were a couple of hiccups here and there - for example I have learnt the difference between PAL and NTSC (resulting in corrupted display of my PAL FF7). Fortunately I managed to correct it with a program called Zapper (you can find it here), but it took some more time. As for YouTube and recording video from PSP - don't even get me started.

But the efforts were well worth it. The PSX emulator runs smoothly and does its job very well in case of most games. The custom firmware is great, eliminating the need to use DevHook both for UMDs requiring higher firmware than 1.50 (meaning most of them) and for ISO emulation (done on the flight, user can run ISOs straight from game menu). Homebrew programs can be run both in kxploit versions (for 1.50) and normal ones (for 1.00). All the goodies from 3.02 firmware are there (visualisations, RSS and so on).

All in all, I am very pleased with my new firmware and the new possibilities it opens. This is truly a great Christmas present for the PSP community.

I promise to post more details anytime soon (such as which HowTos are good, what tricks there are and so on), but I thought I'd share the impressions together with a movie to show you how great it is.

Christmas comes early this year!

I will break my offline mode to give you some really great news: Dark_Alex, the PSP cracking mastermind, has just released Custom Firmware 3.02 OE-A (read the official release thread here)!

For all those who might not understand what this is all about, here's the breakdown of what's there:
- you can enjoy all the goodies of 3.02 firmware together with homebrew capacity of firmware 1.50 without resorting to DevHook (straight after turning your PSP on);
- this means Flash, WMA support, neat music visualisations and so on;
- UMD video region lock is lifted;
- the most important aspect of it is Pops (PSONE emulator) with DRM protection hacked, meaning PS1 emulation working without worrying about the licence (you can share your game with your friend without having to pay for it twice). Finally you can take PS3 out of the equation if you want to play PS1 games on your PSP!

This is truly ground-breaking news!

Image of PS1 Syphon Filter on PSP taken from NeoGAF.

I have to admit I feel a bit sorry for Sony R&D engineers. They were working for so long to make this solution as crack-proof as possible (developing DRM system was the main reason for postponing 3.00 firmware) and now this...

I won't be flashing my PSP now, because the solution is very fresh at the moment and I don't have net access to consult forums and IRC channels should anything go wrong. After Christmas break it should be mature enough and there should be lots of instructions and user comments on forums, so expect me to welcome new year with some flashing.

Holy shoot! PS1 emulation is here!

It was just a couple of days before that I ranted about how Sony's release of new PSP firmware 3.0 that everyone awaited due to included PS1 emulator managed to turn out to complete crap. The comments indicated that I am perhaps just a malcontent.

Still, I said then that there is someone working on homebrew PS1 emulator. Well, I was wrong. There is more then one PS1 emulator in the works and a new version has just surfaced (read this news on DC-Emu and this forum release thread)!

The great news is that it is very promising. See the movie below (unfortunately it's a little blurry) :

I tested Final Fantasy myself today and I have to say that for an alpha build speed is very good. The game looks just gorgeous on PSP screen, with additional blurring provided by scaling the image. Of course, as it can be observed at the beginning of the above movie, the battles are still quite choppy, but fast forward to around 3:12 and see how smooth the gameplay is while navigating through maps. And there's more to come - as I mentioned, it's just an alpha build. No sound either, but I really can't wait to see another build.

I promise to make a better movie myself, but my digital camera is in repair, so it will have to wait 'till the weekend. Still, I thought I'd share the news, because it is really something.

PSP firmware 3.0 and PS1 emulation.

As reported by Kotaku and PSPUpdates, this night the newest Sony firmware hit the web. And although I have been impatiently waiting for it for quite some time, I must say that it is yet another disappointment (did you notice how often I recently use this word?...). You can see it in action here :

Video courtesy of SkatterTech.

The feature that we all have been impatiently waiting for, namely the PS1 emulator, is indeed there, but implemented in a crippled and annoying way:

- you have to actually own a PS3 to be able to download games from Sony Online Store (!). You can't use either your PC or download them directly using PSP.

- the official list of emulated titles is very short and the only all-time favourites that are there is Resident Evil (Bio Hazard) Director's Cut and Tekken 2. Yes, no Final Fantasy whatsoever.

- and finally there isn't any game available in the Sony Online Store yet (!). In Polish there exists a nice expression "the last nail to one's coffin" - it fits perfectly this case.

So the emulator is there (or is it, really? I mean how can we be sure, if... nah, just forget it), but we cannot use it. Great. What else?

There are some other things, like music visualisations, but they are not something I would upgrade for - especially since it would deprive me of my homebrew. On top of that there are homebrew visualisers, not much worse in my opinion. You can watch them in this YouTube video :

Visualisations compared head to head.

There is support for PSP camera (is it even out yet or is this another feature that we cannot test for now?), there is an option to turn off UMD auto-loading (took them some time to add this one, huh?), there are three different speeds for fast forward and fast reverse in MP3 playback (terribly innovative, I know), online instruction manual (why only online?), and some PS3 connectivity gimmicks. Blah.

All in all, another major disappointment. I really am wondering what kind of strategy it takes to do as many bad moves as Sony did recently.

Still, there is a ray of hope. Recently Yoshihiro has released new version of his homebrew PS1 emulator for PSP. See the video below :

Yoshihiro's PSXP running Crash Bandicoot

If he manages to get it up to some playable framerate, we might then collectively say "No, thank you" to Sony's new firmwares. And that's about the only positive thing today.

'Cause I'm a loser

We all make mistakes. This obvious truism will be the motto of this post, as I will write a few words about how I managed to make an arrogant fool out of me.

As you probably have already noticed, I am an avid fan of retro games. I have always liked their atmosphere and (in their time) freshness of ideas. I still recall some of the worlds I visited as a child thanks to them. The system that had made the biggest impression on me in the old days was Amiga. Consoles were not really popular back then in Poland (price, availability), so for me it was Amiga that opened the door to the realm of colourful digital entertainment. I actually never had Amiga (my parents could not afford it), but played a lot at my friends' places.

Now that I have grown older, I still enjoy occasional trip down the nostalgy lane. Recently PSP has become my gaming system of choice, with one of the reasons for me to buy it being the possibility to write my own programs and running homebrew applications on it. The Polish article on Amiga emulation on PSP made me shiver lustfully and finally I spent my hard earned yens on a brand new Japanese PSP.

How does that relate to me behaving like a total bastard? Read on.

Well, one of the first things I did on my PSP was to run PSPUAE, the Amiga emulator. I think it was more or less version 0.41. Anyhow, I was quite disappointed. Barely playable framerate, problems with compatibility, and very long loading times. Briefly, I abandoned it waiting for a next release.

This PSPUAE screen is here just to distract your eyes from the tons of writing in this post...

Which in fact never came. Its author (Christophe Thibault) got either bored with it or overhelmed by the task of optimising the code for the PSP, the project was apparently dead.

After more than half a year the things got better though. Some people, namely Ric, FOL and Hungry Horace (if I missed anyone out contact me via mail or comments) started all over again. Partially based on the 0.41 version, they have continued developing the PSPUAE.

I was in fact overjoyed. I downloaded the first release (0.51), tested it and wrote my thoughts in comment on PSPUpdates. I indicated that speed should be the priority (as if they didn't know...) and that maybe Zx-81 (a coder famous in the PSP homebrew community for releasing many good emulators) might help.

Since I didn't get any reply back then, I wrote them again in comments when 0.55 was released (you can read it here). And that is where I made my first major mistake. I did not check the answers later, because actually the guys took time to reply to me.

Therefore, more and more annoyed I continued to rant in a more and more nasty way on release 0.60 and on release 0.61.

I am ashamed to admit that I didn't go back checking for replies more than two or three times. Hence the tone of my rant got more and more offensive, there is no denying it. Until...

Until one day I came back on the last release, saw angry reply of FOL, learned that in fact they asked Zx-81 to cooperate with PSPUAE team and he refused, went back to my previous comments and realised that FOL and Hungry Horace have replied to me at least a couple of times (starting with rather kind explanations).

I have to state that at that moment I felt like a complete and utter ass.

What makes this even more silly is the fact that I was recently reviewing PSPUAE and even though I pointed out the framerate issues and loading times, I wrote that I found it better then the previous versions and generally liked the direction in which it was going (see it here).

The excuses that I love Amiga games, that I want to be able to play them on my PSP, that I in fact was pleased with the progress of the emulator (as stated in this post) don't change the fact that not only have I made a fool of me, but an arrogant bastard too.

Optimising code, refactoring, increasing the efficiency of a program are never easy tasks, especially in an environment that has numerous constraints and you can't reply to your customer "buy more RAM and a faster processor". Doing that without any gratification in what might have been one's free time is even more demanding. And hearing in return : "this sucks, make it better" is definitely not rewarding.

From the tone of replies I could see that they were not only annoyed, but seriously offended and touched by the tone of my comments. Definitely, it was unfair of me. People put their effort in bringing something up and all they get in return is ingratitude (that is a little bit of an understatement).

So what could I do about it?

I decided that full apologies and an explanation of why I behaved like that are the only way for me to save face. Therefore I registered at pspuae.com forum and I posted a big sorry to folks over there (which you can read in this thread). I won't be quoting all of it in this place, but I tried real hard to explain that I generally am not a malicious person, didn't mean to be that nasty and that I do hold their hard work in esteem.

In the end everything finished more or less all right. My apologies were accepted and although I got a few bitter comments (rightly so, they were deserved), Horace and FOL seemed to appreciate the fact that I admitted being wrong and apologised. I certainly do hope they feel a little better after that.

If you have read through this story (trurly heart-breaking, I know), you can go to pspuae.com and send them a little word of encouragment so that they see there is some positive reaction to what they do.

PS. And the positive result of all this fuss are is that I have a new release of PSPUAE on my Memory Stick, as well as some other emulators (CaSTaway, among other things) in order to provide some better in-depth comparison. Expect it as soon as I finish the Dungeon Siege : Throne of Agony review.

A link to the past...

In the wake of recent experiments with Amiga emulation, I have tried emulating Gameboy. Yes, the very same 8 bit Gameboy Classic, the first real portable gaming console. At the time I was in love with the system and it took me some time before I actually got to own one.

In fact, my brother finally snatched one in more or less '95, and I could play in the rare moments when he got bored with it (which of course happened to be definitely too scarce). To be honest, I have bought my own private one out of nostalgia just last month. What? It cost just something under ten euro, I can afford that. And no, I am not strange, thank you so much - it is not much for a trip back to the roots.

The first and the last generation of portable gaming.

Emerging from the depths of my memories, let's get back to emulation. In order to be able to play your favourite old hits, a homebrew emulator called RIN will be necessary. The latest version is 1.32 and it handles the task flawlessly. Everything runs smoothly and there is absolutely no game that would cause any compatibility problems. RIN also emulates everything up to Gameboy Color (like Super Gameboy and such), so there is a variety of titles to choose from. It is also much easier on the eyes to play those games on nice and shiny PSP screen (yes, backlit LCDs were not used back then). You can apply different color schemes, contrary to the dark-green-on-light-green Gameboy screen.

I have to admit, though, that I only really play some titles using RIN. Why? Because, well, I only do own a few games (all of them absolute classics) and I think playing games that you don't own and that are still available on the market (be it Ebay or second-hand console rentals) is piracy. Which is bad, by the way.

Anyhow, if you want to refresh your happy childhood memories and try a few rounds of Mario or Zelda without bringing your ancient (and heavy, I might just add) Gameboy Classic, now there is a way to do it comfortably on your PSP. Plus it also allows you to play some Need for Speed should you get bored, although for us, the dinosaurs of the 8 bit era, no NfS can beat the adventures in the cosy monochrome shades of green.

Amiga emulation on the PSP

One of the main reasons to buy my PSP was being able to emulate Amiga. Yes, at the time I was thinking of getting it I didn't care so much about the games, but was absolutely excited by the possibility of being able to play Amiga games anywhere on the go. After having bought my PSP in January 2006, however, I realised that things weren't yet all that good in the emulation department. I haven't been able to play my beloved Wolfchild, a game that I had so fond memories of.

I didn't have Amiga back then, because my parents couldn't afford one, so I had to play this game at my friend's place. I was totally enchanted by the atmosphere of this game - I even had my friend record music tracks from the game for me to listen on my tape-recorder... Although the game was very hard, the combination of music and artwork created incredible experience that I can't forget even now, many years later.

Wolfchild - now on your PSP.

Anyways, the developers are working (albeit a bit slowly) and things did get better over the course of last few months. As you can see above, I was finally able to play Wolfchild on my PSP. I used PSPUAE 0.60 and with a frameskip of 2 it was running at a speed which I wouldn't yet call decent, but definitely playable. That taking into account playing in fullscreen and with sound. Loading time was a bit of a drag, but obviously this version of PSPUAE has progressed in terms of compatibility and speed, as compared to half year back. I do hope that in a few more months this game is going to be 100% playable with a perfect framerate.

I also checked a few other games (SWIV etc.) and although some frame skipping is necessary to get reasonable speed of emulation, the results are highly promising. I am waiting for another release.

Oh, and by the way, there are two excellent remixes of the first level background music available on the web - one by Lomaxx and one by Paul Blackford. I highly recommend downloading them.