A good deal of people, myself included, bought a PlayStation Vita simply because they wanted a PSP on steroids since it can play PSP games natively together with its own library of games and homebrew. As a result, there was a good deal of community interest when a bounty for native resolution PSP games dropped and now, Macrike has injected $500 into it. In this article, we’ll be looking at the bounty’s current state and what can be expected.

What is this bounty all about?

As the PSVita has PSP hardware in it, it’s excellent for playing PSP games but unfortunately, they still run at 480×272 out of the box

As the title suggests, this bounty revolves around the creation of a PPSSPP port/renderer for the PSVita which makes use of the PSP hardware found inside the console.

From a more technical point of view, it has been proposed by scene veteran ColdBird that while playing PSP games, the PSP MIPS processor found inside the PSVita does processor-related calculations while the PSVita’s GPU takes of graphics-related calls by tunneling them into the GE render chain.

Moving away from technical details, this bounty has been around since the 1st of August 2019 and it was created as part of Rinnegatamante’s VitaNuova programme. Since then, the bounty has raised a good deal of money but there’s only been a single developer, who goes by the nickname ‘robots’ who’s at least attempted to tackle it.

Macrike injects $500 into the bounty and other recent developments

A few days ago, robots announced that he couldn’t really find much time to work on the project due to work

Ever since its inception, progress updates from ‘robots‘ on this bounty have been a bit sporadic partly due to the fact that it requires a tremendous amount of work and due to ‘robots’ being busy with other projects at work.

However, a couple of developments have happened during this week that may change the status quo which include:

• Robots has announced that he “can’t find a way to allocate time” to finishing the bounty meaning that it’s unlikely that robots will be providing a finished implementation any time soon
  

  but a series of contributions, including a $500 by Macrike, may improve developer interest in at least taking a look at the bounty!

  • It is currently being hoped by community members that robots publishes the work/research he’s been able to accumulate so far so that others can continue his work someday
  • As per comments left by robots, he did a good deal of research into how sceGe works and how the PSP’s GPU works as there is little to no documentation on the subject
• The bounty has skyrocketed from $740 to $1325
  • This was primarily achieved through a $500 contribution from Macrike

While the fact that the bounty’s value has skyrocketed generates some hope, it must be noted that it’s still not a lot of money for a project of this magnitude. As a result, it is still uncertain whether this bounty will ever be realised with a working implementation especially now that ‘robots’ has announced that he can’t keep on working on it at least for the time being.

Conclusion

Hopefully, developer ‘robots’ will share some of his research/work which could help other developers come up with their own implementation for this bounty. Until then, you’re probably better off playing PSP games on a smartphone/tablet or a hacked Nintendo Switch if you want to play them at a higher resolution on the go! However, you can play GTA LCS/VCS on your PSVita at native resolution thanks to a patch by TheFlow.

Other than developments relating to this bounty, a plugin called Quietshot has been released by cuevavirus/Marburg of Team CBPS which lets you take screenshots, photos, videos and panoramic photos without the shutter sound.

Native resolution PSP games bounty: https://www.bountysource.com/issues/78071014-native-resolution-for-psp-games-on-psvita