How complete is the PSP emulation?

[DJMarco]

I just tried version "pre 0.7" and I must say that is progressing very nicely and fast, great work Henrik! Now I have a question: apart from bugs which need to be found and fixed, how complete is right now the PSP's hardware emulation? Which features are still missing that need to be emulated to make other games work? Thank you!

[Henrik]

Mainly:

* Graphics need a lot more work, sound mixing too
* Audio and video codec support, with connection to FFMPEG, is still entirely missing
* Some bits and bobs like PGD decryption and some other minor features like VTimers
* Async I/O needs a rewrite

Other than that, it's just optimization and bugfixing. Lots and lots of both.

[[Unknown]]

Not to forget we have some vfpu/cpu bugs somewhere it seems like as well. There's also probably still some threading related issues.

-[Unknown]

[Henrik]

Yes, those would go under "lots and lots of bugfixing"

Oh yeah, there's all of the wifi/network stuff as well left to implement.

[kouta-kun]

Out of the tasks that are not bug fixes or optimizations, what would you say is most likely to happen first? or where community resources are being pooled?

[VIRGIN KLM]

BTW, wouldn't ATRAC3/ATRAC3plus audio be able to be decoded via LLE? (OS Universal)

[[Unknown]]

Virgin, sure it could be. Got a reasonably powerful microscope, a PSP you're willing to tear the microchips out of, and tons of free time? I don't really know the full process, though.

Kouta-kun, I think that the list above is probably in a reasonable order, actually. There's also someone taking a stab at sceFont, iirc, although I don't know if that will get any games farther but it'll definitely make them more playable.

There are still a bunch of unemulated HLE functions, and a bunch that have missing features. That's "bugfixing" but it really represents the largest part of the unimplemented features.

-[Unknown]

[VIRGIN KLM]

I'm talking about encapsulated LLE approach just for the audio unit, or just the important parts for decoding and put all that to a different thread for speed. I didn't mean a whole PSP emulator on LLE, that's insane. (Think of it like Dolphin's different functions for DSP emulation) I doubt any Android device would like the idea of LLE emulation for atleast the next decade, plus I bet Sony would do anything to sue anyone that would start an ATRAC3/ATRAC3+ decoder even if it's technicaly legal to do so, they can always twist law. My only other idea would be create a script that grabs all the audio streams that the game calls from the ISO disc, make a list of them, transcode them to .OGG (I'd say M4A too but OGG is the only quality efficient codec that has no padding which is usefull for loop pointers) at a bitrate like 128kbps for stereo and 64kbps for mono (so your SD wont fill with the streams of one track) and push them to your Android's SD and then redirect the Audio files that the emulator calls to the already decoded files inside the folder you pushed to your SD card. You'd need to make though like a database of audio filelists for each game but it sounds more possible or probable to happen than any other attempt to get ATRAC3+ on non-Windows OS builds.

[Orphis]

There's no legal issue of having an ATRAC3+ decoder in the emulator, so no need to get creative with these audio files. Going LLE to decode the multimedia part isn't the easiest way to do it, really.

[VIRGIN KLM]

I don't say that there is technicaly any legal issue with ATRAC3+ decoder in the emulator, I said that Sony has proven that whatever they wouldn't like they can twist it as illegal since they have proven that they can buy law over and over, and having worked with Sony in the past I'm pretty certain they'd do it because it would result their proprietary format become obsolete in their SDKs. What I tried to say is that if LLE decoding of multimedia files has a feeble possibility to happen, more feeble is the possibility for somebody to reverse engineer a proprietary format with such complexity as ATRAC3+ even after so many years that there was high demand and nobody even attempted to do it, let alone the fact of doing it for both x86/x64 and ARM.

[Henrik]

Stop writing such paranoia. It'll be fine, someone just need to come up with a way to decode ATRAC3..

There's no way to do LLE ATRAC3 decoding because we simply know nothing about the media accelerator chip in the PSP. Don't even know if it resembles a CPU or not.

If nobody ever figures it out we'll probably be stuck with the pre-converted Ogg solution on non Windows platforms yes.

[livisor]

(02-09-2013 04:14 PM)Henrik Wrote:  Stop writing such paranoia. It'll be fine, someone just need to come up with a way to decode ATRAC3..

There's no way to do LLE ATRAC3 decoding because we simply know nothing about the media accelerator chip in the PSP. Don't even know if it resembles a CPU or not.

If nobody ever figures it out we'll probably be stuck with the pre-converted Ogg solution on non Windows platforms yes.

Staring at logs could help finding a solution to atrac3.?It's painful how little I understand of what you're talking in terms of coding:-p

[Apology11]

(02-09-2013 07:32 PM)livisor Wrote:  Staring at logs could help finding a solution to atrac3.?It's painful how little I understand of what you're talking in terms of coding:-p

No, its way more complicated:

If you have an mp3 file for example you have mediaplayers with decoders for it, so they can transform the file into the audio you can hear.
In case of atrac3+ there is no such decoder aviable, but only included in the psp and in sonic stage for windows.

So someone has to try out how the decoding works and try to write a decoder that can do it. That needs a lot of time to figure all things out.

But if someone creates a codec and publishes his work open source we can use it in ppsspp to decode the atrac3+ files from the games.

[livisor]

(02-09-2013 07:41 PM)Apology11 Wrote:  

(02-09-2013 07:32 PM)livisor Wrote:  Staring at logs could help finding a solution to atrac3.?It's painful how little I understand of what you're talking in terms of coding:-p

No, its way more complicated:

If you have an mp3 file for example you have mediaplayers with decoders for it, so they can transform the file into the audio you can hear.
In case of atrac3+ there is no such decoder aviable, but only included in the psp and in sonic stage for windows.

So someone has to try out how the decoding works and try to write a decoder that can do it. That needs a lot of time to figure all things out.

I wonder if contacting Dark Alex or some other psp cfw dev would help on this.The psp underground scene is not quite dead yet so I'll try talk to some old friends:-)

[m45t3r]

(02-09-2013 08:53 PM)livisor Wrote:  

(02-09-2013 07:41 PM)Apology11 Wrote:  

(02-09-2013 07:32 PM)livisor Wrote:  Staring at logs could help finding a solution to atrac3.?It's painful how little I understand of what you're talking in terms of coding:-p

No, its way more complicated:

If you have an mp3 file for example you have mediaplayers with decoders for it, so they can transform the file into the audio you can hear.
In case of atrac3+ there is no such decoder aviable, but only included in the psp and in sonic stage for windows.

So someone has to try out how the decoding works and try to write a decoder that can do it. That needs a lot of time to figure all things out.

I wonder if contacting Dark Alex or some other psp cfw dev would help on this.The psp underground scene is not quite dead yet so I'll try talk to some old friends:-)

I think someone who's more specialized on RE of codecs, like Kostya from libav project would be more qualified to do this.