Friday, January 26, 2007
There is a god and his name is Dark_Alex.Some of you will know that some time back I began messing around with running homebrew and emulators on my PSP, using a thing called the eloader by Fanjita and Ditlew.
Well... that was a hack that made use of exploits to get past security features in the PSP firmware. It worked fairly well too.
Now, this chap called Dark_Alex has gone a huge step further. He's entirely hacked the firmware, and created a custom version of the latest firmware, while incorporating the ability of much earlier firmware.
What this means is, as well as being able to run all the latest commercial games, run all the emulators and homebrew I had already been using, I can now use the PS1 emulator that's built into the latest firmware.
More than that... the PS1 emulator in the standard Sony release only allows you to play the PS1 games that they drip feed to users, and which you have to pay for... even though you probably already own the original. So... the new custom firmware totally bypasses all the Sony bullshit, and with a little messing around with conversion utilities, allows you to play whatever PS1 games you like.
So I now have Gran Turismo 2 up and running on my PSP. Yay!!! :D
Truth is, I've been getting more and more pissed off at Sony, as the months have gone by.
I bought the PSP with the intention of playing Gran Turismo on it, but they've delayed it, and delayed it, and delayed it some more.
Then they release the PS1 emulator, but you can only play what they want you to play in it... and worse, you have to have a PS3 to do that.
Dumbasses.
So, no more waiting and no more being screwed. I can do all the things the PSP was actually designed to be able to do, but that Sony are too all controlling to let us do.
Labels: consoles, emulators, games, gran turismo
Steve 10:35 AM [+] (0) comments
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Deluxe Paint 4 on a PSP?
Bwaaahahahahaha.
I love this thing.
Labels: consoles, emulators, photos
Steve 9:50 AM [+] (0) comments
Monday, February 27, 2006
Yup.... I'm sure no-one cares what systems I'm emulating on my PSP, but I don't care.Here's the updated list.
Sinclair Spectrum
Commodore 64
Nintendo NES
Nintendo Gameboy/Colour/Advance
Nintendo SNES
Sega Megadrive/Genesis
Atari Lynx
Neo Geo CD
Of these, all run at a very playable speed except the GBA, which is a bit ropey still.
What I'd like next is an Atari 2600 and an Amiga emulator.
There's talk of an N64 emulator, but it seems to me that if the PSP struggles to do the GBA, it's got no hope of doing the N64.
There's also talk of doing the PS1... and that's maybe more of a possibility. We'll see. It's just all rather good fun, being able to have nearly every worthwhile retro games machine in your pocket at the same time. (Okay, so it's a big pocket.)
Okay.... update time...
I got an Amiga emulator running on it too now.
Yay!!!
...and
Neo Geo Colour Pocket
PC Engine
Vectrex
Atari 2600
Steve 7:50 AM [+] (0) comments
Friday, February 24, 2006
This evening/morning has been spent installing more emulators onto my psp, and loading them up with the best games I can remember from each format.So now the thing can run Sinclair Spectrum, Atari Lynx, Sega Megadrive, Snes, and Gameboy/GB Colour. I did have a Game Boy Advance emulator on there, but dumped it, coz it was just a smidge too slow to be worth the bother, especially when I have the real thing... which is a damn site easier to carry around.
Steve 6:04 AM [+] (0) comments
Monday, May 23, 2005
Hah!!!Emulators are wonderful things.
For ages there were no usable Sega Saturn emulators, and for ages I had no way of playing Radiant Silvergun on my real Saturn without paying around £130 on ebay.
So this morning I found a fully functional Saturn emulator and then managed to make a downloaded copy of Radiant Silvergun work on it.
This isn't a perfect solution, as I'm restricted to using the keyboard to play the thing... far from ideal, but I dare say sooner or later they'll update the emulator to accept keyboard input.
Still... game collecting being what it is, one of these days I'll actually stump up the money to buy the game anyway.
Labels: consoles, emulators, games
Steve 5:57 AM [+] (0) comments
Tuesday, October 05, 2004
Progress.After much messing around with various builds of the emulator executable and tinkering with a proxy server, I now have the ppc mac running with net access and native CD support. Better yet, it's faster than it was too, now thinking it's a 1.15ghz G3 mac.
It has to be said, this is the most interesting emulator I've come across. Like... there's a whole emulator community out there anyway, but this one has a community all of its own. There's around a hundred people working on the emulator itself, many producing different builds, yielding different results. This is handy in that you can often find a build that suits your machine very well, but it can get very confusing when it comes to configurations, coz no two emulated machines turn out to be the same, and one persons fix doesn't work for another.
The best example of this is setting up net access. There's a billion and one totally different walk throughs explaining how to do it, all completely different, and all very confusing.
To finally get it working, I had to install a virtual ethernet card onto my pc which allowed the mac to talk to the pc... even though they're both in the same box. Having done that, even though the mac could "see" the internet, it couldnt connect, or rather, it couldn't find a dns server. It'd probably work just fine if I knew what IP number to stick in what box, but since there's 3 different areas needing different IPs (my pc local area network, my virtual ethernet and the mac itself) I'm damned if I could figure it out. Anyway... the bodge fix of setting up a proxy server on the pc and routing the mac through that worked just fine... though I do worry a little about what that does for security.
Conversly, getting native CD access was an absolute doddle.
All I did was download a new build, copy 2 lines from a config file, and bam... CD access on the mac.
I doubt many people who read this blog are actually very interested in emulators, so I wont bother putting up a billion links to all the places I found the necesary info, but just in case there's anyone who's up for a challenge and wants to try it, this is a good place to start. As for finding an OS to put on it... well, legally speaking, you could download a free version of linux or whatever for power macs, buy a copy of OS X, or if you're not bothered about legalities, find a preconfigured disk image on one of the many peer to peer networks. I hear there's a good one on limewire, though obviously I can't confirm that.
Labels: emulators
Steve 5:06 AM [+] (0) comments
Monday, October 04, 2004
Bleh.These emulators are doing my head in.
Both the classic and ppc macs are up and running, but even after much reading of online tutorials and doccumentation, messing with assorted virtual ethernet adaptors and proxies, and god knows what else.... I can't make either of them go online.
It shouldn't be this hard. My amiga emulator only requires the ticking of one simple box and it's online, just like that.
Worse, the ppc mac won't even recognise CDs when I put them in the drive. Doh!
I think I'm gonna give up for now, before I pull all my hair out.
Labels: emulators
Steve 8:30 AM [+] (0) comments
Sunday, October 03, 2004
More emulation malarky.I've got an old style apple mac emulator up and running, but for reasons that escape me, can't seem to make the thing go online.
Anyway... this is all old hat, as I emulated the classic mac very effectively back when I used an amiga.
What I'm also working on, and I dunno how easy it's gonna be, is a powermac emulator that 'should' run mac OS X. The doccumentation says it'll run way slow, so I'm not expecting much. I have to try though, just to see if it works, coz it's one of those things people always said was impossible.
Now if this 500 meg download will just get a move on....
Labels: emulators
Steve 11:07 AM [+] (0) comments
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
So what can I tell you that wont bore you rigid?Not a lot.
I've been on an emulator frenzy again.
There's a huge collection of emulators and roms here, which is a great starting point, and even more emulators for lots of machines, to be run on lots of machines, with very useful reviews, here. And then the MESS multiple computer and console emulator fills in a lot of gaps. Bios roms for that can be found here.
It seems an odd thing to do... buying a brand new and rather powerful pc, and then using it to play ancient console and computer games... but I just can't get enough of them.
As an aside, I dunno what tripod have done, but links in my posts that are supposed to open in a new browser, don't. How annoying.
Labels: emulators
Steve 1:48 AM [+] (0) comments
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
The past few days have been spend trying not to move around too much.I guess I'll be a little more specific about this pain I mentioned recently. I've found a lump, in about the last place a guy wants to find a lump, so yeah... I'm rather worried. I have an appointment to see the doctor tomorrow, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that its something minor. There's a dozen things it could be... and hopefully it'll be something they don't have to open me up to cut out *shudders*.
So I've been spending my time messing with a whole bundle of emulators, just for something to do.
I installed a Spectrum emulator just to play Jetpack, 3D Ant Attack and 3D Death Chase, coz apart from 3D monster Maze on the ZX81 (Timex 1000) those are the 3 games that really got me into home computers back in the early 80s. Curiously, I never actually had a Spectrum back in the day, my family was poor, so I had to make do with an Atari 2600, but all of my friends had them, so I got to play a lot of the games. I have 2 in the loft now though... the infamous rubber keyboard 48k version, and a later 128 +2.
Also newly installed is a Gameboy/Gameboy Colour/Gameboy Advance emulator. Now I've never really rated gameboys... like okay, they have good battery life and let you play stuff wherever, but to me, the technology has always been so far behind current consoles that the portability never really made up for the dated feel of the games. Anyway... I just wanted to see how good (or otherwise) Gameboy Advance games are, and nope... I wouldn't buy one.
The final Emulator I installed is a bit of a curiosity called VibaNono. It emulates the Namco System 22 board, though is only compatible with Ridge Racer, Ridge Racer 2, and Rage Racer. Still, it's quite impressive, and even on my lowly 1 ghz laptop with weedy onboard 16 meg gfx, Ridge Racer 2 far surpasses the PS1 version of the game. That'll deffinitely be one to load onto my new pc when I finally get round to buying the thing.
Steve 8:47 AM [+] (0) comments
Saturday, August 21, 2004
Welcome to geeksville, where the geeking geekiness never ceases to geek.Er... what?
Anyway.
More emulation tinkerings, so feel free to close your browser and read no further, coz it almost certainly won't interest you.
Back to the Amiga emulator today, coz I found a site with loads of adf format Amiga games, and better yet, I found a configuration on my emulator that'll actually run them.
What games did I grab? I know you really wanna know. (or not)
Battlechess, F1 GP, Hard Drinin', Hunter, Knights Of The Sky, Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge, Lotus 2, Pinball Fantasies, Road Rash, Scorched Tanks, Stunt Car Racer, Vroom, and Epic.
And for a change, my concience is completely clear while downloading these, coz I bought all of them years ago and have the floppies in the loft.
It's rather interesting to play them again after such a long time, coz people say you remember such games with rose tinted spectacles, but to be honest, even though they all look shockingly dated, they're still great fun to play.
Sadly though, I can't find the game I really wanted... Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker.
Steve 3:02 AM [+] (0) comments
Friday, August 06, 2004
Mame is a peculiar emulator. Frustrating even.They keep 'improving' it, to make it closer and closer to the original arcade hardware it emulates, but each time they do, it seems to become slower, and less compatible with the game roms that are out there.
So technically they're right, as the roms only stop working coz they're not dumped or ripped in a truly authentic structure, or something, and need nothing but a simple redump, but when most of the roms you find on the web are for older versions of mame and you have to really hunt to find ones that work, these 'improvemnts' become nothing more than a pain in the arse.
On the plus side, I can now play R-Type, R-Type II and best of all, R-Type Leo. All classic and truly brilliant sideways scolling, totally mental, arcade shootemups.
Also on the emulator front... last week I downloaded a Sega Saturn emulator, something I've been waiting for for a long time. The Saturn being a very complex piece of hardware, it's taken a long time for any emulator to even 'claim' the ability to run commercial games software.
So, having got the emulator and OS rom file, it's taken around a week to find a game image I wanted to try on it... ie, not huge, and reputedly a decent game... in this case Radiant Silvergun, a legendary shootemup.
After much messing around converting the file into a useable format, guess what? It didn't run.
Bastard!
Think I'll give up on Saturn emulation for now. What with the size of the files, the complexities of file conversion and unreliablity of the emulator, it's just not worth the effort.
Back in the real world for a moment, *shudder* the trip to Derby is indeed on. My friend phoned me last night... waking me up in the process, and asked if I was still up for the trip. It was kinda funny, coz she was asking if I was gonna be up in the morning, and I said I was... so she (she knows me well) asked if that meant I was gonna be up coz I'd been up all night or if I was gonna get some sleep before then.
"I was sleeping... remember?"
I had to chuckle.
Great thunder storm last night... pity I slept through most of it. I was vaguely aware of some very loud crashes and booms very nearby as I drifted back to sleep, which made for some interesting dreams.
It must've been a good one, coz when I got up an hour or so ago, my laptop was off, meaning the power must've been out for a while. I never turn the laptop off unless I'm going out for some time.
Pity I missed it, but... sleep is good :-)
Steve 1:45 AM [+] (0) comments
Thursday, July 29, 2004
Well that was cool. I found the Amiga In A Box project... basically a fully preconfigured Amiga OS with a load of extras thrown in, including Amirc and a whole load of other bits I couldn't quite make work.My real Amiga that sits up in the loft has a 50mhz 68060 cpu in it... the fastest 68xxx series amiga you could get. This laptop now thinks its an amiga almost 10 times as fast.
I know... it's an entirely pointless exercise, as I can't really do anything on the emulated amiga that I can't do on this windoze laptop.... it's just nice to have it.
Nostalgia's a funny thing.
Labels: emulators
Steve 4:18 AM [+] (0) comments
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
Last night I was on a serious mission of geekdom.After my full format and windoze reinstall, I've not really gotten round to putting a lot of the software I had back onto my hard drive, mainly coz I'm still planning to get a new pc soon, so there's not much point.
Still... I found myself missing a few emulators, so went to work installing Sega Genesis, Saturn, Commodore Amiga, and Mame emulators. After playing Sonic The Hedgehog for a bit, I went on the hunt for Amiga files.
Took ages to get the operating system, but once that was done, I found this version of the software much more stable than the old one I had... which was nice.
The thing that bugged me though... and this has always been a grumbling point for all serious amiga users... there's masses of game files out there, all dead easy to find, but serious software? Apart from freeware and shareware, I had a nightmare finding anything remotely useful at all. Couldn't find any useful net software, which was really annoying, coz I have a real urge to use Amirc again... *still* the best irc program on the planet.
Labels: emulators
Steve 4:55 PM [+] (0) comments
Wednesday, December 17, 2003
It's no secret that I lean rather to the geeky side of computer usage... emulation being one of my passions.So I just completed installing the MESS emulator... this thing runs software for just about every computer and console made from 1975 onwards (and one designed in 1956) up to the Sega Megadrive (Genesis) with a bit of a stab at the Nintendo SNES too.
That's not where the *real* fun started though.
Ohhhhhh No!
I have one word for you... actually, it's two... I think.
NeoGeo. Neo Geo? Umm.
Whatever.
Now, there's a lot of crap in this system, despite amazing hardware for it's time, and not being into beat-em-ups, I amost gave it up. Then I discovered the Metal Slug series.
Excuse the expletive, but Oh My Fucking God!
These games are ***NUTS*** and so are the people who're hosting the roms. Metal Slug 3 weighs in at around 75 Megabytes!!!
I laughed my head off when I saw the size of it. Then I laughed again when it actually downloaded. The I laughed again when it wasn't corrupted. (Obviously this wasn't done at home on my own machine... I was at a friend's house, or something *cough*)
Then I played it. Words fail me.
It's (all 4 of them) a sideways scrolling shootemup with the most awesomely detailed (2D) graphics you've ever seen, and the number of sprites on screen at any one time defies belief. Level designs are of a quality you just wouldn't believe.... and the humour... I could show you screen grabs, but they wouldn't remotely do it justice. If you'll excuse the cliche, these games are vastly more than the sum of their parts and if you have just one ounce of gaming passion in your body, you really should look them up.
Steve 8:20 PM [+] (0) comments
Wednesday, February 12, 2003
How time flies when you're having fun... or pulling your hair out.I'm doing the emulation thing again, this time with an Apple Mac emulator. After MUCH tinkering about, I now have the equivalent of a Mac Quadra 900 running either a somewhat unstable version of Mac OS 7.5.5 or a cut down version of OS 8. Neither seem to be very useful as 7.5.5 is too old to run much good software, while 8 has got so many control panels missing, not much works on that either.
I can't get the thing to go online either, which is a pity, though not exactly important. Sadly, I'm finding it far less useful or even usable than the emulated Mac I ran on my Amiga, using Shapeshifter and OS 7.61.
It's not so much that shapeshifter was a better emulator, but 7.61 was very stable and usable... and I can't find a copy of it online any more. I'd have copied it across on CD, but my Amiga hard drive died some months back, and the backup cds didn't survive either. Cheap crappy things.
I guess I'll just keep my eyes open on the web and wait to see if any naughty person makes a bootleg copy of 7.61 or 8 available.
Labels: emulators
Steve 12:13 AM [+] (0) comments
Tuesday, January 28, 2003
You're probably sick of reading me waffle on about emulators, but I'm sorry, I have to do it again.I'm impressed. No, I'm VERY impressed.
Gran Turismo 2 on Windows? I'd heard about Play Station emulators, but didn't really believe they'd be much good. The console in question may be a bit long in the tooth these days, but those are still some pretty funky custom gfx chips, and would surely take a minor mirracle to emulate effectively enough to play any games.
So I thought. Hah!!!
Okay, here's the score. I'm running a Sharp laptop with a 1.1Ghz AMD Athlon, 256meg ram, with the S3 Savage 4 3D gfx card, which anyone who knows about gfx cards will identify as a truly crapy graphics chipset. So, a fairly average system, and extremely below average 3D capabilities. So, running the ePSXe emulator, with bios files from here and all the other required plugins from here, I'm now able to run Gran Turismo 2 at full speed, with only very minor sound glitching on options screens.
Way cool.
Labels: emulators
Steve 1:09 AM [+] (0) comments
Sunday, January 26, 2003
I'm in emulation heaven.MESS the Multi Emulator Super System is a truly wonderful program based on the mame32 engine. I've had this piece of software sitting in my emulation folder for a couple of months now, and due to a lack of system roms, had considerd it fairly non-functional. Until last night that is....
First I found this site containing a whole pile of working system roms, followed by this site containing more roms, and quite a lot of software to run on several of the systems.
I could list all of the machines I'm now successfully emulating on this laptop, but the list is rather long... like around 200, but a few of the real gems and curiosities are as follows -
APEXC, from around 1957, this thing is freaky. No keybaord, monitor, or anything else that seems to make any sense, but a few flashing lights. Odd.
The 1975 MOS Technologies KIM1, which looks more like a glorified calculator, having just an LED display and small keypad.
Chess Champion MK2 from 1979, a dedicated chess computer.
Assorted apples, Nascoms, Ataris, Commodores, Orics, Tandys, Texas Instruments, and a whole host of other machines I've never even heard of.
My personal favourite though is a fully functioning Vectrex games system with a full set of working games.
Whoohoo!!! :-)
Labels: emulators
Steve 11:51 AM [+] (0) comments
Tuesday, December 10, 2002
See, I'm heading into hyper-geek territory here, and you'd have to be not just a hyper-geek, but an old hyper-geek to appreciate this program.vb81 is a ZX81 (Timex 1000 to all you americans out there) emulator, and runs such wonderful games as 3D monster Maze, the very first game I played on a home computer.
Check out the awesome graphics power of this machine.
It's kind of like a very early and very crappy precursor to Doom, but with a T-Rex instead of monsters, zombies and whatever.
Steve 5:32 AM [+] (0) comments
The geekiness continues.
I found a better version of the mame arcade game emulator, and then went and grabbed a whole mass of game roms here.
You have to sign up for that site, and wait for a password via email, but if you're an old games freak like me, it's totally worth it.
In my now extensive collection of games, the faves list includes Asteroids, Battle Zone, Bomb Jack, Centipede, Defender, Donkey Kong, Frogger, Galaxian, Gyruss, I Robot, Klax, Marble Madness, Marvel Super Heroes, Marvel Super Heroes Vs Street Fighter, Missile Command, Pac-Man, Phoenix, Scramble, Space Invaders, Speed Freak, Star Wars, Street Fighter II, and Tempest. These are all arcade perfect, because they ARE the arcade games, not some dodgy conversion.
So... my next project, a snes emulator to play Mario Kart, and then perhaps a ZX81 emulator... I have the urge to play 3D Monster Maze. Bet no-one remembers that one, hehehe.
Steve 3:24 AM [+] (0) comments
Saturday, December 07, 2002
So, more emulator sillyness.I've been playing with a version of mame to play ancient but perfect versions of arcade games.
Recognise these screenshots? They're two of my all time faves.
Now, off to see if I can find the roms for Battlezone, I Robot, and Gyruss.
Steve 10:29 PM [+] (0) comments
Thursday, December 05, 2002
I dare say no-one's interested, but since this is my blog, I'm gonna tell you a bit more about this Amiga emulator thingie anyway.After much screwing around, one corrupted disk, and 3 reinstalls, I've got the thing to access the pc's CD drive, display in 24 bit, as well as the standard chipsets, and the speed's up from just faster than a bog standard A500 to just slower than an A4000 with 25mhz 68040. It's probably faster when in 24 bit mode, as it doesn't have to emulate the gfx chipset, but there's no way of testing 'cause sysinfo defaults to a native screenmode.
It really is a pity my tower system's HD died, as I have a great Mac emulator on there that I could've copied across. Now that would've been a laugh. A pc emulating an Amiga, emulating a Mac, emulating a C64. Totally pointless, but a great novelty.
Labels: emulators
Steve 12:58 PM [+] (0) comments
Wednesday, December 04, 2002
I'm having someting of an emulator frenzy at the moment.Just for fun, I downloaded and installed a Mega Drive (Genesis) Emulator which runs brilliantly on Windows XP (very refreshing after all the ones that only seem to want to run under DOS), and spent several hours playing Sonic The Hedgehog with full sound, joypad control and everything. Then just for the hell of it, I grabbed some addon 32X bios files, and started playing the likes of Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter and Star Wars Arcade. Much fun.
Anyway, that's no even the main story. While rummaging around online I found this site containing not only the UAE Amiga emulator, but also the kickstart rom files, and a complete set of Workbench installation files. Hah! Being a long time Amiga fan, I grabbed the lot and installed them.
It has to be said, even as someone who's forgotten more about the Amiga OS than most people ever knew, it was something of a pig to make this work at first, but I now have a clean installation of OS 3.1 up and running, and a copy of Directory Opus too, though with the differences in disk file formats, it's pretty much impossible for me to transfer all of my old Amiga software over to the pc, especially as my 1200 tower system appears to have died. However, I did manage to dig up an old backup CD of my system disk, which contains a lot of support files, libs and stuff, though the other backup CD from my Work drive was corrupted. Seems writable CDs don't stand the test of time too well.
Now, if I can just find something useful to do with the thing...
Labels: emulators
Steve 9:10 PM [+] (0) comments
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