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PPSSPP (an acronym for "PlayStation Portable Simulator Suitable for Playing Portably") is a free and open-source PSP emulator for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, Nintendo Wii U, Nintendo Switch, BlackBerry 10, MeeGo, Pandora, Xbox Series X/S [3] and Symbian with a focus on speed and portability. [4] It was released to the public on November 1, 2012, licensed under the GNU GPLv2 or later. The PPSSPP project was created by Henrik Rydgård, one of the co-founders of the Dolphin emulator. [5]
PPSSPP supports save states, dynamic recompilation (JIT) and has rudimentary support of ad hoc wireless networking. To decode PSP multimedia data PPSSPP uses the FFmpeg software library, which was enhanced to enable it to handle Sony's proprietary ATRAC3plus audio format as used by the PSP. PPSSPP offers graphical features that are enhancements over the PSP's capabilities, such as higher screen resolutions, antialiasing, image scaling, support for shaders, and linear and anisotropic filtering.
The ports of PPSSPP for mobile devices offer additional features specific to each platform, such as 'immersive mode' for Android devices, support of the multimedia buttons within Symbian devices and screen stretching on BlackBerry 10 devices to support square screens. All ports of PPSSPP for mobile devices support the use of accelerometers, keyboards and gamepads as input devices.
PPSSPP also supports the Vulkan API, which was added in v1.5.4 release and is intended to provide a substantial performance boost on supported devices. [6]
Since its inception, PPSSPP has had a focus on portability with support for multiple architectures and operating systems. While initially only supporting Microsoft Windows and Android, this quickly grew to include Blackberry 10, Symbian, macOS, Linux and later iOS. [7] [8] The source code also unofficially supports a wide variety of operating systems and platforms, including Raspberry Pi, Loongson, Maemo, Universal Windows Platform (Windows 10 Mobile, Xbox One, Windows 10 (X86_32, X86_64, ARM and ARM64)), Meego Harmattan and Pandora. [9] There was at one stage a port for Xbox 360. [10] Although the port was abandoned, the support code remains, offering support for big-endian CPUs and DirectX compatible GPUs.
To aid with the portability, two cross-platform development libraries—SDL and Qt—are able to be used in addition to the non-portable Blackberry, Android, and Win32 interfaces. The Qt frontend was instrumental in adding support for platforms such as Symbian. [11] The Qt frontend is able to support all officially supported platforms and is the suggested alternative if no native interface exists. [12]
As of March 2017, 984 games are playable in PPSSPP, while 67 games load to some frame of in-game state. 4 games can only reach the main menu or introduction sequence. [13] As of July 2020, almost all games are playable in PPSSPP emulator. [14]
In 2024 the iOS version was released on the Apple App Store, following a change in Apple's developer guidelines which now allows the publishing of emulators for legacy video game systems. The App Store release lacks the ability to use just-in-time compilation due to restrictions by Apple, though the developers also noted that contemporary Apple devices should be able to run most games at full speed even on an interpreter. [15]
UAE is a computer emulator which emulates the hardware of Commodore International's Amiga range of computers. Released under the GNU General Public License, UAE is free software.
In computing, cross-platform software is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software requires a separate build for each platform, but some can be directly run on any platform without special preparation, being written in an interpreted language or compiled to portable bytecode for which the interpreters or run-time packages are common or standard components of all supported platforms.
In computer science, dynamic recompilation is a feature of some emulators and virtual machines, where the system may recompile some part of a program during execution. By compiling during execution, the system can tailor the generated code to reflect the program's run-time environment, and potentially produce more efficient code by exploiting information that is not available to a traditional static compiler.
Qt Extended is an application platform for embedded Linux-based mobile computing devices such as personal digital assistants, video projectors and mobile phones. It was initially developed by The Qt Company, at the time known as Qt Software and a subsidiary of Nokia. When they cancelled the project the free software portion of it was forked by the community and given the name Qt Extended Improved. The QtMoko Debian-based distribution is the natural successor to these projects as continued by the efforts of the Openmoko community.
In software engineering, a compatibility layer is an interface that allows binaries for a legacy or foreign system to run on a host system. This translates system calls for the foreign system into native system calls for the host system. With some libraries for the foreign system, this will often be sufficient to run foreign binaries on the host system. A hardware compatibility layer consists of tools that allow hardware emulation.
PearPC is a PowerPC platform emulator capable of running many PowerPC operating systems, including pre-Intel versions of Mac OS X, Darwin, and Linux on x86 hardware. It is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It can be used on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and other systems based on POSIX-X11. The first official release was made on May 10, 2004. The software was often used to run early versions of OS X on Windows XP computers.
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