Having recently found out about the work of the PSP Development Kindergarten group, I decided to recompile one of the pspMAME builds from their code. Here are the results:

Asterix

Sunset Riders

Ninja Turtles

Aliens

Crime Fighters

Almost nothing runs full speed, but the improvement is absolutely noticeable regardless. Akumajou Dracula (the arcade version of Castlevania) runs 20 FPS faster on the PSP Development Kindergarten code:

And at least on a PSP slim, a lot more games will now launch simply because this build has been compiled with the option to use the extra memory if it’s there. The sbrk_psp:overflow message should pop up a lot less.

Download

Get it here: https://archive.org/details/pspMAME

Romset

The PSP port of MAME is based on version 0.97. This is kind of a weird version, so finding the right romset for it can be a pain. The closest sets are AdvanceMAME (based on 0.106) and MAME 2003 (0.78) - the best option is to get either of those (or better yet, both) and let a program like RomCenter do the heavy lifting.

Save states

This feature was already in the MAME code, but it hadn’t been implemented for whatever reason. Now it’s accessible from the in-game menu (default button: L). Press R after selecting save or load to confirm.

The save feature seems to depend heavily on whatever happens to be in memory when you select it. So if you try to restore a saved state before the game is fully loaded, glitchy things will happen.

Start the game first, load the state only afterwards, and things will work just fine.

Variable frameskip

Some arcade games have absurdly long loading times at the beginning.

As a workaround, assign some hotkeys to change the frameskip in the menu (input (general) -> user interface). You can then skip through the various ROM/RAM checks, and decrease the frameskip again once the game starts.