DaedalusX64 is the current incarnation of the Nintendo 64 emulator started by StrmnNrmn. Its first PSP release came out in May 2006 and to this day, its GitHub page still sees regular commits. Z2442 is the man behind many of them. We asked him about the project and its future.

Are 16 emulators too many for a single system? If you’re a PSP owner, that’s how many choices you have to emulate the NES.

If there is a system the PSP can emulate well, it is the GameBoy Advance. The screen ratio is similar, they are both handhelds, and there are no extra buttons to emulate. The PSP overall serves GBA games pretty decently. Let’s see who we have to thank for this.

There are many custom icons and backgrounds available for PSP on the web, but how many look this good?

The eternal question about homebrew games: are any of them any good? Or less charitably - are there any homebrew games that aren’t absolute trash? The eternal answer so far has been: we don’t know. Other than Cave Story (which gets recommended every time the question crops up), few people had any knowledge of other good homebrews.

Everyone loves to hate on RetroArch. Being part of the ‘everyone’, I wholeheartedly share the sentiment. The emulator is a classic case of a jack of all trades and master of continuously crashing piece of software.

One of the most frequent questions about homebrews on PSP is which emulator offers the best performance for a given system. Providing an answer is tricky: the limited specs of the first Sony handheld mean that developers have to cut corners to emulate even the simplest systems. Depending on the specific optimizations, some games will work best on one emulator, while others on a different one.

Let’s be clear, this is a large improvement over the Yabause 0.9.10 builds that were floating around the internet before this one was (re-)discovered. But that does not mean you will be able to play Sega Saturn games on your PSP. Or at least, not easily.

There is a seemingly unlimited supply of PSP homebrew games running on the Quake engine. What is less widely known, is the existence of a 3D engine that was nearly as successful. And was created specifically for the PSP.

It runs like ass, but it runs. pspMame Deathrash is a modified version of PSPmame, with support for games the Japanese developer who created the original port might have cared less for.