Phantasy Star Portable 2 Infinity

[dhRPGamer]

Since there is an almost half a year gap between the main discussion and the more recent bumps, I'm not sure if the disappearing polygon graphics glitch has been resolved, or if the people in discussion eventually found their workarounds for this problem.

Long story short:
Someone on the PPSSPP github came up with a workaround tweak quite some times ago, I tested it, and it seems to work fine, at the cost of some minor graphics artifacts. If anyone's still interested, feel free to PM or email me.


Short story long:
As for myself, couple of years ago I've enjoyed PSP2 on the original fat PSP hardware, unfortunately though my PSP did not age as gracefully as I hoped and the analogue stick is broken (crucial to just about all action games on the PSP) and nothing I could do short of getting another PSP could fix it. I gave up on it then, but a few weeks ago I came across this wonderful PPSSPP thing and my hope fired up once again. PPSSPP has yet again gained another faithful fanboy.

That's when i met this ungodly disappearing polygon rendering glitch, which basically makes this game unplayablly difficult as a lot of the times you, your side kicks, AND THE ENEMIES are invisible. A few hours into the game, on most of the free missions the small critters are somewhat manageable, but the big ones are another story altogether. As it is, a lot of times you actually won't know until a giant dragon the size of a monster truck smashes into your face.

Looking through the interweb led me to the github for the PPSSPP project itself. Basically, one person suggested altering the minimum and maximum rendering distance for the polygons, and has a screenshot of his tweak to prove that it works. Afterwards, it took me about a week poking around learning how to compile PPSSPP from its source, and applying the suggested tweak. And I can only say, it works. If you (like me) don't sweat the very minor rendering artifacts, the game is now perfectly playable.

As to why the tweak isn't already posted in forums, looking through the github seems to suggest that some procedures needs to happen before people can distribute copies of recompiled PPSSPP due to some licencing issues, which is not impossible but I suspect most people only cared about get their game going (myself included) and would rather not spend time on minor things like proper distribution their tweaks, specially when it isn't even technically a "fix".

Although I can now play the game, I would be very interested to know if anyone will eventually fix this glitch properly.