Why is this "emulator" closer to real hardware than ppsspp is? It has better compatibility and it also has a one menu, so I don't know if this is emulation or not. The ps vita is sure as hell not powerful enough to emulate psp games, since my 1ghz pc has problems running god of war, and the ps vita runs it flawlessly. Why is this? I know I have posted some cringeworthy shit lately, but I am getting nixed answers from this, some people say it is real hardware, most say it's a full software emulator, so what is the case?
Wow, that emulator is like 100% more accurate than ppsspp will ever be. I'm suprised that it was done so well on the hardware it is on. I would expect god of war chains of olympus to lag like it does on ppsspp. The game is so demanding because the game has an unlimited frame rate and can go as high as the gpu output the frames, hence making it a more demanding game for emulators to run. The ps vita runs it so well, I'm absoluteley floored.
I'm almost sure the emulation is at least somewhat hardware assisted. Remember reading somewhere that the Vita has a bit of psp in it though I may be wrong
That's because it's hardware based emulation, there is a whole MIPS Allegrex R4000 embedded within the PS Vita's Kermit SOC.
PS1 emulation on the psp is different, they use the Allegrex to run MIPS R3000A instructions in some sort of translation/compatibility mode (they actually do that on the ps1 emulator for vita as well, which runs on top of the psp "emulator"), and use the ME for things such as sound or FMVs (this part is handled by the ARM on the Vita as the Vita has no Media Engine). On the Vita, the whole PSP's Allegrex CPU is present, there are no instructions to translate as everything runs natively, the very few modules that run on the ME (3rd party developers could not write their own ME modules) are "emulated" through an ARM version running on the Vita side. All video outputs are sent to the SGX framebuffer. In fact on Vita the whole psp boot chain is present, so you have a pre-ipl/boot code (originally stored in compat_sm) which is mapped to the Allegrex reset vector, just like the psp bootrom, then an IPL, then the whole kernel and so on. It's not so much emulation as having psp hardware embedded in the Vita. PS1 emulation on psp on the other end does not make use of any extra/dedicated hardware, although the fact that the PSP's Allegrex also uses MIPS instructions helps in making seemless translations. On the PSP (and the Vita) when running in ps1 mode, a whole dedicated psp kernel (called pops) runs for this purpose.
Slightly off topic but, I read up specs on psp from wikipedia, and it says that the psp lacks a vpu. Is this really true? Does the psp really not have a dedicated gpu, or is a vpu a completeley different thing. Sorry for the lack of understanding, I just need more clarification. I also am well aware that the posts I am making are obvious answers to you, but I am new and still learning.
What do you mean by VPU? If it's a Vector Processing Unit, the psp has the VFPU for that https://sites.google.com/a/davidgf.es/davidgf-net/home/psp-dev/vfpu-test It also has a dedicated GPU called GU. A simple google search would have told you that. Heck I don't know what wikipedia page you went on, but this is an extract from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Portable page Embedded Vector FPU @ 3.2 GFLOPS Graphics Core 2:[64](Rendering Engine and Surface Engine) Pixel Fill Rate: 600 megapixels/s Up to 33 million polygon/s (with transform, lighting and texturing) 24-bit full color: RGBA 256-bit bus, 1-166 MHz @1.2V at 2.6 Gbit/s 2 MB eDRAM (VRAM), 512-bit bus, 5.3 GB/s total bandwidth 3D-CG extended instruction set Please document yourself and use search engines before asking obvious questions. I (and most likely others) don't like wasting my time by spending the 5 minutes search you should have conducted yourself.
"The secondary CPU present in the Media Engine is functionally equivalent to the primary CPU save for a lack of a VPU. The MIPS CPU cores are globally clocked between 1 and 333 MHz." This is stated on the wikipedia page titled "psp hardware" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Portable_hardware
The keyword here is "secondary" the main CPU (Allegrex) has a VFPU (which obviously includes the "Vectors Processing" part), therefore ME does not need one, especially as ME is dedicated to hardware codec decoding either for AVC streams or for sounds through its integrated DSP, it isn't designed to be used as a general purpose CPU.
