Hacking the PSP Blog

Exclusive Sony announcements primed for GDC

Sony Worldwide Studios president Phil Harrison has confirmed that Sony will be making "exclusive announcements" and next month's Games Developers Conference.

Speaking to 1UP, Harrison refused to elaborate on Sony's plans for the event, only adding that Sony "have some interesting announcements to make".

"I think it's no secret that we're going to make a couple of exclusive announcements there," he said.

Harrison also said that Sony will not allow competitors to change its plans and that the firm will continue to plow its own furrow.

"It's important to understand from our point of view, we are not focused on one competitor, trying to adjust or change our strategy because of what one competitor is doing in the market," he said. "We have our strategy, we're here to grow the market, we're here to build out the PlayStation brand and experience on a worldwide basis, building on the success that we have and we're continuing to do that."

Andy Robinson
February 15, 2007

Source: CVG

"No PSP development in UK," says UK developer. But what of DS? And does it matter anyway?

An anonymous UK developer, writing in the comments section of, this Gamesblog post has provided a scathing assesment of the PSP's future. "There are virtually no PSP games being developed in the UK," he claims, citing comparatively high development costs and small userbase as key explanations.

"At a GDC conference in Brighton last year, everyone walked away from the PSP. Developers had to budget for PS2 content on a handheld with a tiny userbase. Its not cost effective, (especially when the alternative DS has a massive userbase and is cheap to develop for).

At the same time, Nintendo had sent Wiimotes that plug into Gamecube devkits to all registered developers. Instead of forking out thousands of quid to Sony for devkits that they still weren't releasing, studios were coming up with innovative Wii ideas. Instead of training coders to program the world's most complicated Cell processor, the Gamecube team just switched to the Wii."

A quick look at the PSP release schedule shows a flurry of activity heading into mid-March (just in time for Easter), but things thin out afterwards. Stalwarts like SOCOM and Metal Gear Solid should prop things up, but in terms of true Triple A titles coming from British developers, there's really only Manhunt 2, plus Sumo Digital's conversions of Virtua Tennis and Driver 76.

It could be argued, of course, that major UK-developed DS titles are just as rare. Diddy Kong Racing DS, perhaps. What else? Britain has never really been a major force in the handheld market, with publishers usually outsourcing portable conversions to smaller third-party studios, which are often given just six months to port console code across to handheld platforms.

Read the full text here...

Keith Stuart
February 14, 2007

Source: Guardian Unlimited

Off Topic: Further decline for print mags

The latest figures from ABC have revealed that gaming magazines appear to be in a continuing decline, with a few bright spots as readership of many Future and Imagine titles falls once again.

OPSM2's monthly circulation is down 24 per cent from the August 2006 figures to hit 76,351. But there has been a 17 per cent rise for Official Nintendo, with readership almost topping 43,000 copies per month.

Official Xbox 360 is also up from 42,680 to just over 56,000, with sales likely to have been boosted by the closure of Official Xbox Magazine. Figures for the new Official PlayStation 3 Magazine were not provided.

Excluding OPSM3, 175,368 official titles are sold each month - compared to 218,863 six months previously.

As for the battle of the unofficial mags, Future's PSW is down from nearly 34,500 to just over 26,000 copies, while Imagine-published Play is in the lead with 29,000 - despite a 37.5 per cent drop in readership compared to a year ago.

Circulation for Imagine's Powerstation was down to 15,171 from 22,288 in February 2006. Future-published rival PSM2, currently transitioning to become PSM3, saw a drop of more than 25 per cent over the past six months to hit just over 26,500.

Xbox 360 World, another Future mag, saw its circulation remaining steady at around 23,000, while readership for Imagine's X360 was up more than 20 per cent to edge past the 28,000 mark.

The figure for 360, also published by Imagine, fell slightly from 13,098 to 11,369. Relative newcomer Uncooked Media experienced a rise in sales for 360 Gamer, which went up from 9100 to top 10,600.

PC titles appear to be in a slow but steady decline - PC Zone is down from just over 30,000 to 27,000, while PC Gamer lost 1675 readers to hit just over 43,600.

It's a different story for the multi-platform titles, which appear to be in a stable position. Games Master's readership is now hovering around the 54,000 mark following a small increase in sales, while circulation for Imagine's Games TM still stands at just over 20,000. Once again, Edge faired better than many of Future's publications - readership is up from 33,597 to 35,145, a rise of more than 4 per cent.

Ellie Gibson
February 15, 2007

Source: GamesIndustry.biz

Get your song in Burnout

EA's teamed up with Virgin Records and Epiphone to go on a MySpace-wide talent search for the best new bands and artists, offering the winner a chance for their track to appear in Burnout Dominator.

Not only that, if your song is voted into the top ranks by the MySpace community and picked as a winner by a panel of judges, you'll also bag yourself a Virgin Records demo recording contract.

All you have to do to enter is create a MySpace account for yourself, or your band, then upload your track and enter it into the competition. Your tune will then go into a gallery, one for the US and one for Europe, where the online community will listen and rate your entry, resulting in a winner being selected for each region.

The Burnout Bandslam competition began earlier this month, and the closing date for it is 14th March.

Head over to the website if you're feeling lucky, or to vote on other people's creations.

Burnout Dominator is due for release on PS2 and PSP on 23rd March. Head over to the gamepages for the latest media.

Rob Purchese
February 14, 2007

Source: Eurogamer

StrmnNrmn on Daedalus Audio Support

StrmnNrmn sure has been keeping us up to speed about the progress of the next version of his N64 emulator for the PSP, Daedalus R9. His latest update reveals information about implementing audio support in Daedalus, what to expect from it and how it affects performance. Here's an excerpt form his post discussing the implementation of audio support:

So, back to audio support in Daedalus. I had come to the point with implementing various dynarec improvements that I felt it was worth looking into audio to get an idea how how well it would work, and how much of a performance hit there was. As I was saying, one of the reasons I'd been putting off implementing audio support was that I knew that taking a high-level approach was going to be time consuming and error prone. The alternative, low level emulation, just wasn't practical from a performance point of view.

In the end, I decided to see if I could find the source for a PC audio plugin, and adapt this for use with Daedalus. I was fortunate enough to discover that Azimer had made the source for v0.55 of his audio plugin available (Azimer - if you're reading this, please drop me a line to say hello :) My reasoning was that if I could get something up and running in a couple of evenings then I could figure out how much work would be involved in getting it polished. If it looked like it was going to be too much work then I could revert all my changes and at most I'd have wasted just a few hours.

In the end it all went incredibly well. Azimer's source was very self-contained, with just a couple of hooks to implement to get it working. There were a few small issues to solve like having to upsample the output to 44.1KHz (as the PSP output is fixed at this frequency), but nothing that took more than a couple of hours.

So, how does it sound? Well, it's pretty variable. It sounds great in places where there's a high enough framerate to keep the audio buffer full. Mario 64 is pretty good for this - it seems 25fps is a minimum to avoid any choppiness in the output. When the framerate drops lower than this the audio quality does start to suffer significantly. On the plus side, it seems to be decoding everything correctly in all the roms

Which brings me to my next point - how does enabling audio support affect the performance of the emulator? I've not had chance to measure this empirically, but it probably slows things down by about 10-20%. Given that R9 is running about 40-100% faster than R8, you should be able to run R9 with audio and still see a small speedup. In any case, I've added an option to enable or disable the audio in the front-end (this is also accessible from the pause menu while the rom is running). I've tested so for, which means that the quality is only going to improve as I make further improvements to the performance of the emulator.

You can read StrmnNrmn's message in it's entirety here. Keep checking back for more updates or maybe even (*GASP*) a release.

Source:  Retro Console Dev