If you haven’t noticed, the latest cool updates to HBL are thanks to our genius fellow coder JJS. JJS recently found a way to perfectly estimate most syscalls on most models of the PSP. What this means to the end user is that for example your favorite emulators will now run at full speed without the need for a configuration file, and without sacrificing stability. It also means that some homebrews will now work better (JJS mentions that Opera mini on the Java VM now works perfectly fine without stopping during the install process).

There’s a small drawback though. This update doesn’t improve HBL on firmware 6.20 for the PSP 2000 and PSP3000. JJS found a way to have it work on the PSPGo 6.20, but unfortunately it relies on a trick that works only for this model. I know I said a few weeks ago that it was fine to update to 6.20, and people will probably hate me for that, but hopefully we’ll make progress on these models and this firmware one day too.

For the models on which this change works (that is, all models and firmwares, except PSP2000 on 6.20 and PSP3000 on 6.20), emulators run at their native speed without a need to use any specific configuration overrides (actually, configuration overrides – a.k.a. syscall hooks – will not work anymore for models that have this perfect syscall estimation, because by definition, they are not needed anymore)

Here’s an example with Daedalus R13 running Mario64 on a psp go. both R95 and R96 are run “out of the box” with no specific configuration.

to make it clearer, this change improves HBL on the following machines: PSP1000/2000/3000 for all firmwares except 6.20. PSP Go for all firmwares, including 6.20. Of course, HBL is still compatible with all psp models up to firmware 6.20 included, and no, this change doesn’t magically bring compatibility with firmware 6.30 or 6.31, so don’t ask.

Once again a huge improvement to HBL, download here and enjoy 🙂