Can we get a HENkaku port?

[Ume99]

Hi all!

HENkaku is a new native hack for the PS Vita and can run homebrews, however it can't install or play PSP ISO/Backups - porting PPSSPP to HENkaku would make this the single greatest hack ever (imo)!

Sadly, I'm not competent enough to port this and don't have any knowledge on the subject. But I would be eternally grateful if someone was to take up the task.

link is - henkaku.xyz

[[Unknown]]

Well, the goal of PPSSPP is not to enable piracy. Are there games on the Vita that don't run properly within the Sony emulator provided with the system (I heard once that it includes some portion of PSP hardware - so compatibility might be pretty good)?

Also, do any SDKS for the device support OpenGL?

I don't even have a Vita... doesn't have too many interesting games yet and the memory card + console + game prices are too high combined for it to be worth the few games I am interested in...

-[Unknown]

[atomsk]

(08-01-2016 02:51 AM)[Unknown] Wrote:  Well, the goal of PPSSPP is not to enable piracy. Are there games on the Vita that don't run properly within the Sony emulator provided with the system (I heard once that it includes some portion of PSP hardware - so compatibility might be pretty good)?

As far as I know you can only officially use the PSP emulator with games available in the PSN store, so there should be a lot of games left out.

(08-01-2016 02:51 AM)[Unknown] Wrote:  Also, do any SDKS for the device support OpenGL?

It should be possible to use the Play Station Mobile SDK, even if it was discontinued. So maybe it's not so different from an Android port.

[MuskratDesman]

using official emulator, even using hacking, not to play, for example, in prototype builds games that require 64 megabytes of RAM. and therefore it is impossible to run some homebrew.
therefore ps vita need ppsspp.

[Accel]

Actually, PSP DLCs doesnt work on Vita. So, a reason? I guess?

[Kaeril]

If only for being able to play PSP games upscaled to the Vita 960x544 native resolution, which the official emulator doesn't allow (and can't do in any way, whichever hack you intend to apply on it), it would be worth getting PPSSPP as a Vita homebrew.

[[Unknown]]

Okay, those sound like good reasons. I read that Retroarch runs on it, which makes me think OpenGL is available in some form. It has a PowerVR SGX 5, which will be interesting (I wonder how the Vita's emulator handles alpha testing...), but since it's ARM it sounds like it should be doable.

Would really just need the same parts of the code other platforms do - gamepad, startup, config path, etc.

Has anyone with a Vita tried to compile PPSSPP against the Vita toolchain yet? It might even be easier if it supports SDL in some fashion.

-[Unknown]

[Kaeril]

Apparently someone has compiled SDL for Vita successfully, you could have a look or maybe ask the author for more information: github.com/xerpi/SDL-Vita

[MuskratDesman]

(08-01-2016 02:51 AM)[Unknown] Wrote:  I don't even have a Vita...

You can arrange fundraiser. For example, vita-tv is not so expensive.

[TkSilver]

You might want to check out retroarch for vita since I think squarepusher is doing a port and see if the ppsspp core is available in it.

[Accel]

(08-05-2016 03:23 AM)MuskratDesman Wrote:  

(08-01-2016 02:51 AM)[Unknown] Wrote:  I don't even have a Vita...

You can arrange fundraiser. For example, vita-tv is not so expensive.

Yeah, you might want to get Vita TV instead of normal Vita because using PS4 controller on Vita games are over powered

[[Unknown]]

Not sure. I've read contradictory information about the CPU speed of the Vita - it sounds like the hardware is capable of more, but it may be locked to a max 444 Mhz. If that's the case, performance will probably not be great.

Also, from some educated looking Twitter posts, it seems that the Vita includes a MIPS processor - and runs PSP games on this processor. I wonder if it contains the PSP's GPU as well, because if so that would easily explain how it can run well on PowerVR.

Given that, PPSSPP may not be able to bring a lot to the table... not sure. But if it's a 444 Mhz clocked ARM device with dedicated PSP hardware for its built-in emulator, then hoping for 2x PSP resolution doesn't sound very likely.

Even if it can be clocked up to 2 Ghz, PPSSPP currently has tons of problems specifically on PowerVR SGX543 (the GPU Vita uses.) Some seem like OpenGL driver bugs, but I'm not sure how capable it would be for some of the trickier effects. If the Vita actually uses the PowerVR for its PSP emulation, I'd be very interested in what tricks they're using - it probably involves accessing the hardware and VRAM directly, though (which we can't do generally on Android, PC, etc. - so PPSSPP is not written to do this.)

-[Unknown]

[Coldbird]

(08-06-2016 08:21 PM)[Unknown] Wrote:  Not sure. I've read contradictory information about the CPU speed of the Vita - it sounds like the hardware is capable of more, but it may be locked to a max 444 Mhz. If that's the case, performance will probably not be great.

Also, from some educated looking Twitter posts, it seems that the Vita includes a MIPS processor - and runs PSP games on this processor. I wonder if it contains the PSP's GPU as well, because if so that would easily explain how it can run well on PowerVR.

Given that, PPSSPP may not be able to bring a lot to the table... not sure. But if it's a 444 Mhz clocked ARM device with dedicated PSP hardware for its built-in emulator, then hoping for 2x PSP resolution doesn't sound very likely.

Even if it can be clocked up to 2 Ghz, PPSSPP currently has tons of problems specifically on PowerVR SGX543 (the GPU Vita uses.) Some seem like OpenGL driver bugs, but I'm not sure how capable it would be for some of the trickier effects. If the Vita actually uses the PowerVR for its PSP emulation, I'd be very interested in what tricks they're using - it probably involves accessing the hardware and VRAM directly, though (which we can't do generally on Android, PC, etc. - so PPSSPP is not written to do this.)

-[Unknown]

Well... technically it all depends on how you are going to play your cards here.

We know from the way PSP games operate on the Vita in the built-in emulator, that the thing runs both CPUs at the same time, with the "PSP" one doing the actual PSP work, and the media engine (PSP co-processor) being high-level emulated on the ARM CPU of the Vita.

Sony dubbed this mechanic "kermit", and essentially everything that isn't "kermit-emulated" runs on the PSP CPU.

The stuff that is "kermit-emulated", has a RPC-library inside the PSP CPU scope, which sends HLE requests to the ARM-CPU outside the sandbox, processes its things there, and returns the result in regular RPC fashion back to the sandboxed PSP CPU.

In this scenario, it would still be possible to get the PPSSPP goodness into play here, although with a tad bit more work involved.

One could, instead of rendering to a virtual 480x272 framebuffer and then shoveling it outside to the Vita OS via "kermit", just shovel the whole GE-command chain outside to the Vita OS via "kermit".

This way one wouldnt be bound to a artificially smaller framebuffer, and could re-render things using the regular PPSSPP pipeline.

The issue with this though is that, although all of this is entirely possible to do now that henkaku has been released, none of the functions involved for firing up the PSP CPU have been documented / mapped yet.

This is because those calls are not part of the official Vita SDK.
Once mapped and documented properly though, PPSSPP can definitely make use of the MIPS CPU.

[[Unknown]]

That's good information and points - but I think the GPU is still a very significant concern.

One example is "alpha testing." PSP games often do alpha testing - it's essentially a free operation on the PSP GPU. This might mean if alpha is < 10, skip drawing/blending/etc. that pixel and keep going.

PowerVR does not like alpha testing. It has to do with the way the GPU is designed - it's not built to "skip" pixels. For this reason, PPSSPP tries to auto-disable alpha testing whenever it's safe and possible. There's also a speedhack that disables alpha testing, which makes PowerVR devices run much better.

There are also lots of PowerVR specific issues (at least a few are DEFINITELY driver bugs, but I'm unsure about all of them):
https://github.com/hrydgard/ppsspp/searc...=%E2%9C%93

These range from things like the modulus operator having mathematically incorrect results when used in shaders, to certain modes of blending just straight up not working correctly.

But, a PSP emulator targeting the Vita might well use PPSSPP's HLE. One trick there is that sceKernel functions that deal with threading (like mutexes) would probably need to be handled in the MIPS or RPC system specially. If there's a way to do low-level magic for graphics, or use Vita specific features (they ARE using a customized PowerVR GPU, I just don't know what "customized" means), then those might also need to be implemented in the graphics layer.

It seems the PowerVR is clocked at 400 Mhz and 4 core, which is a good sign. Apple devices ran it at 250 Mhz, so this might really help some of the limitations. But it's hard to say.

-[Unknown]

[Coldbird]

The real issue at hand is that we've only just breached the Vita OS side of things and up until now have only seen the code from the PSP side.

The information I just gave you in the last post is essentially all we know up until now and most of this information has been gathered while we were working on the PSP emulator side of things (Google Ark for Vita).

Sadly I wasn't taking part in the actual Vita OS breaching efforts, so from that angle I'm just another enduser, but the pieces are falling into place now so it's only a matter of time until we get to actually look into things in more detail.

I really want to give things a more in depth look myself as well but I'm currently on holiday and thus lack my usual equipment to do so.

Traveling light with just my smartphone really.