Plain English

[c_j_a]

Can anyone help me? I have seen loads of really exciting posts about people with SNES and Game Boy emulators etc etc.

Can anyone give me a basic explanation of what this all means, and how I go about using this stuff? Do I have to buy the games to be able to play them?

Note I am yet to upgrade my firmware, so want to get involved with it all.

Cheers

[Cap'n 1time]

Currently, not too many emulators for the PSP exist - just the GB and NES is all that comes to mind. I shall explain.

An emulator is a program that simulates hardware from a computer or a game console (like the GB). It does indeed enable you to play ripped or user created content that is compadible with the specific hardware that is being simulated.

By law, to play a game with an emulator you would have to have ripped the software your wanting to run on an emulator by yourself, however (PD) roms exist that are free for use (check out pdroms.com). Its more sketchy then that, but thats basicly how it works usually.

Emulators exist for all kinds of machines, for example you can emulate a nintendo 64 on your windows machine, or a nintendo on a Game Boy Advance, or Neogeo on your Xbox, or even Sega Master System on your Dreamcast. Emulators exist for almost every recent generation console, its just a matter of getting them to run on your console - whatever it may be. It is usually complicated to run this homebrew code on consoles but the PSP (so long as its got a 1.0 firmware) is quite easy. You need to get into your memory card on your PC then (i borrowed this from Wraggsters other site.)

You can then copy this pbp file to a subdir in "PSP/GAME" on your memcard (eg to "PSP/GAME/APP1/EBOOT.PBP")
This tool has been designed so that you could run it at the end of your makefile,
you could even set your makefile to then copy the pbp to your psp after making it
(assuming you first set your psp to usb mode).

well.. i just found this news of an SNES emulator for PSP also. cool
http://www.psphacker.com/2005/05/snes9x-for-psp-minor-update.html