Emulator and battery life question

[selfdestruct]

Hi there

Just wondering what the battery life was life using the PSP to mainly play emulated games? (changing the clock settings, not using UMD etc)

Also how long can it take to set up a PSP to play snes ,gen and mame games?
thanks!

[JollyRoger]

Well even though you wont use the UMD while playing emulators, most of them need to have the CPU speed jacked up, and 333mhz slaughters battery life.(uses around as much as just the UMD alone maybe even a bit more) but hey, don't let scare you away from homebrew.

I, and anyone esle on this site can setup homebrew on a PSP in about ten to fifteen minutes provided we have a computer at our side, so it really shouldn't take you too much longer than that.

[selfdestruct]

Thanks!
Any idea what the battery life is like only using emulators? 6hrs?

[Plowking]

Using the SNES emulator as a guide (it tells you what your battery status is) from a 100% charge I changed the clock setting to 333hz and remaining battery life is about 5+ hours.

Most games I play run fine at 266 (6+ hours) and some games run fine at 222 (7 + hours)

[Cap'n 1time]

Using the SNES emulator as a guide (it tells you what your battery status is) from a 100% charge I changed the clock setting to 333hz and remaining battery life is about 5+ hours.

Most games I play run fine at 266 (6+ hours) and some games run fine at 222 (7 + hours)

as the plowking said. alot of games run well on 266 mhz. I recommend you turn sound off. In some games I also reccomend you turn your Frame Skip to 0 (I know that it slows down gameplay, but sometimes the skipped animations really affect the gameplay). 11 hz sound dosnt really affect the speed much, but it sounds god awful.. 22 still sounds like crap and 33-44 sounds ok usually but can make you loose anywhere between 5 and 30 fps which can hurt your gameplay. of course 33 wont hurt too much when your clocked at 333mhz but as PK said it can kill your battery life though in my experiance not in 5 hours, but maybe 4.

[Plowking]

Dead right about major speed increases with the sound off, but I find I just can't enjoy games as much with no sound. 22hz sounds fine to me for most games.

A problem with the sound on/off is this (this happened to me, don't know about other users) -

If you savestate with the sound OFF, when you reload that savestate you will not hear any sound again from that savestate of the game. Turning the sound option on and off didn't help.

On the frameskip issue, it can effect games where your character might flash (after dying or getting hit) - what happens is that the frame where you can't see your character is the only one being rendered, so your character literally disappears. Sometimes the character wont flash at all, because the rendered frame is other one.

Frameskip 2 works best for games like this - or 0 of course, but that can be slow.

One final thing: on average US versions of some games run about 10 frames (at 60fps) faster than the European versions (about 50 fps). So opt for US when you can. This was evident in the SNES PAL version and was criticised a lot when the SNES appeared in Europe.