PPSSPP Version 0.9.5: What’s New?

As the sole (really? Seriously you guys suck big time at contributing…) person in charge of the PPSSPP compatibility list on the Wiki, I’d say I have some authority to consider this 0.9.5.32 release as an overall improvement over the last. Overall it feels a little snappier, and several bugs seem to have been corrected. A worthy release! But all is not perfect, however, as we will see…

Anyway. The good news is that there are many games I now consider to be green. One important note before I move on. You need to install more a more recent GPU driver for this version of PPSSPP to work. I’ll post instructions soon on how to do so, but a search on the boards should lead you to the right answer pretty quick. You should get the 4.03.02 driver, it works very well with this PPSSPP version, and so far has been stable with all other PNDs as well. Got it?

Now there’s a bunch of games you can actually play AND enjoy with this emulator, because it’s close enough to full speed in these particular titles:

Final Fantasy III, Tactics Ogre, Lunar Silver Star Harmony, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Skies, Castlevania Chronicles, Persona 3 Portable, Disgaea… there are a few others if you like games in Japanese (Mirai Nikki, To Heart 2, Clannad).

In many games, we see a better performance when it comes to videos playback. In the previous version, many videos appeared to buffer several times during playback, which was particularly annoying. We are beyond that point now, most videos play well, while they certainly skip frames when the original quality is too high. And some issues with aspect ratio have now been corrected. Much, much better.

There is noticeable improvement in games such as Patapon 3, where there are more and more full moments in full speed in the game, but it fails to reach acceptable performance when scenes become too complex on screen. Same thing for Loco Roco 2, really close to being really playable, but not there just yet. Final Fantasy Tactics used to stutter like hell and now it’s close to being acceptable in terms of speed. Project Diva is also a little bit faster, and while I consider it very much close to full speed, it’s a delicate situation there. It’s a rhythm game, and slight delays here and there make the game hard to play just right.

But Hey! It may not seem like much but for these games the improvement in speed is probably about 20-30% up. This is huge.

The most complex 3D games are largely unchanged. Wipeout: Pure may be a little bit faster, but it remains a slideshow at best. Same for games in the same league.

Unfortunately, some other games end up broken with this update. This is the case of Star Ocean: The First Departure (I feel sorry for you ED), Valkyrie Chronicles 3 (I’m the one sorry about that one…). The first one now suffers from a strange bug making the characters invisible, while the second’s performance has become abysmal. I have no idea why, but the framerate is significantly worse. Same thing with Shining Ark using the same engine.

The main issue with this emulator remain in the menu of the Pandora version. The emulator still freezes when you try to go in the menu and then go back in the game. It’s a problem if you want to use Save States, for example. I know Ptitseb is annoyed by this as well and wants to look into it at some point.

Obviously I have only tested a fraction of games available for the platform, so you know what? You are welcome to try others, and report your results in the compatibility list so that we can all get a proper picture of a larger subset of games.

I, for one, know that I’m definitely going to spend some time on Persona 3 Portable, seeing how well it runs now.

Thanks to the PPSSPP team for the numerous improvements made, and to PtitSeb for the excellent port as always.