Ppsspp darkstalkers on android

[[Unknown]]

To describe it perhaps a slightly less jaded way:

The hardware renderer relies on games basically drawing things like 3D triangles, the way almost all modern games do now (even 2D games.) This is how it increases the render resolution and applies other effects, like texture scaling. Luckily, almost all PSP games draw graphics this way.

Unfortunately, this game isn't one of them. I don't have the game and have never tried it, so I can't comment on whether it's emulating a retro console internally. Even most ports (like PS1 or PS2 games ported to PSP) render graphics the modern way.

The game is instead drawing things pixel-by-pixel. Specifically for Android, the tough thing about this is it's hard to emulate fast on a modern device, especially phones. Modern graphics hardware is so well optimized for how modern games work that drawing things pixel by pixel is even slower than it ever was before. That's part of why no one does it anymore.

Anyway, there was a broken configuration before called "read framebuffers to memory." It was probably a bit confusing, but it was basically the equivalent of driving in a car and speeding past any red lights (except, it was also slow.) It might seem to be working, but eventually, you'll definitely crash. It's just not the right way to drive a car in the first place, only fools drive that way.

A lot of people would turn on that setting in various games, and then get crashes later. And that setting was originally designed to fix just one game (Danganronpa), which we fixed in a better and faster way anyway. It got to the point where in almost every game (basically except this one, I guess), turning on "read framebuffers to memory" was basically like pointing a gun at your foot. You'd get more graphical glitches and more crashes, and it'd be slower. No pros to those cons, it was just worse. So of the let's say 2000 PSP games, for 1950 or something... this setting was basically stupid to keep.

So like anyone would, we removed the setting (and some of the broken code associated with it.) This actually helped us later when we rebuilt the way multithreading works, and made rendering faster on all devices. Keeping bad code around always has a cost, and usually that cost is progress. If we didn't ditch bad code, this game probably would've never started working in the first place - we'd still be trapped in a maze of duct tape and twine trying to find a way to balance another statue on a tripline.

But if you prefer the style of development that keeps bad code around - best look for a different emulator. One that runs a lot less games on less platforms, and does it with worse performance.

It's a shame that this particular game, with its terrible way of rendering, has been a casualty of this. I'm not sure it'll never work in the hardware renderer, and it might be possible to figure out a way to do something like that old bad "read framebuffers to memory" setting, but without running all the red lights.

We've actually fixed similar issues in a few other games already, but fans of those games were more interested in getting into the emulator and contributing better fixes than getting angry that we threw away ugly masses of duct tape. Remember, PPSSPP is open source - and it gets better when people contribute.

-[Unknown]