Sony official PSP emulator

Just recently found out about this.
Sony included a PSP emulator with its SDK.
I see mention of it in CodeWarrior for PSP 1.1 (during installation, in the docs and in the settings) as well as in the leaked PSP SDK 1.5 (in the 1st_read folder); however the emulator itself seems to remain unleaked.

Here are my questions about it, hope someone can answer them:
-Was it a full emulator? (ie. all features of the console) Or was it more like the PS2 Simulator (SKY: Cygnus GNUPro Toolkit Emotion Engine Simulator) which simulated 1 specific processor?
-Was it licensed separately?
-Was it available at all times? Or only up to a specific SDK version?

Any other info is much appreciated.
Or if you have it and feel like sharing it, feel free to PM me.

 

I indeed heard about it in the SDK documentation, unfortunately I myself had no access to the official emulator, I investigated a bit and here is what I could find in SDK 0.4.0 's changes.txt file.

These are changes pertaining to SDK release 0.3.0 which is where I assume the latest version of the emulator sent to third party was available, as stated in the document, changes_from_emu.txt (which never changes in later SDKs) contain the transition steps from the emu environment to the current one. (I would assume that by that point, every developer had been given access to DEM-1000 hardware.) Unfortunately, I myself do not have access to earlier sdks and anything older than sdk 1.0.3 has long been removed from the devnet.

One can assume this was not a full emulator environnement but unless someone who's had (or has) access to it, steps up, this remains speculative at this point.

 

I have video from it running code but haven't found the emulator itself.

 

@mathieulh
I see a file with same name in the leaked 1.5.0, but with different contents:

There's also the same doc in japanese, and it's also different from the one you posted.
Are you certain there were no updates to it after 0.4.0?

@Borman
Definitely interested in seeing that, if possible

 

It has 3d support at the least, doesn't seem like it has sound though, but that could be the recording. I had sent @mathieulh some of that prerelease stuff. The emulator seems to have been used prior to them having development kits for everyone.

 

I posted the content from changes.txt not changes_from_emu.txt

I am fairly certain it does not change, here is changes_from_emu.txt from sdk 0.4.0 for future reference:

 

This does not surprise me, this seems to match their behavior on ps3 when they made spusim available on all SDKs as part of the elusive PS3_PA (Performance analyser) package up to 180.002 then decommissioned it on later SDK releases once everyone got their hands on development kits, it's too bad because spusim was really powerful and efficient.
They also were very wary of it leading putting (not so well) hidden watermarks in some of the spusim dll files.

 

I also tried to find info about this emulator after reading an article in old game magazine. Japanese developers were annoyed because they had to use emulator to make a game for console they had never even seen. They were also complaining about the low amount of ram (8mb).

 

There were early concerns that the system would only have 4mb for retail, if Im remembering some of the emails I read correctly.

 

Interesting... In the initial specs of the PSP in 2003 it was only supposed to have like 8MB of RAM and like 2MB of VRAM (which I believe is unchanged)

http://www.ign.com/articles/2003/07/29/psp-specs-revealed

 

"Sony is also promising the highest level of copy protection for these discs using DiscID and AES encoding technology."

Made me laugh They failed on every other kind of security xd

 

But had anyone ever successfully copied a UMD?
No form of encryption totally prevents hacking, but only makes things very difficult.

 

Kinda reminds me shitty HDD DNAS

 

With a PSP its simple to copy a UMD but without one im not sure tho considering how broken 1.00 and 1.50 FW where it really didn't matter.

 

Yeah it was too convenient providing FileIO functions in the kernel to allow reading from the accessible hardware.

Oh also a reminder, they gave us functions to READ/WRITE a battery serial in the kernel. They're too nice!

 

Does this mean that there were no physical prototypes before developers started development for the PSP?

You can copy UMDs that way, but that's probably not what the article claimed the protection was about. Has anyone produced reproduction UMDs, without going that route?

But you need I/O functions for games. :/

It's a piece of hardware functionality. Eventually, they removed it with the TA-85v2 mainboard. But that didn't stop people from modding the battery to erase the serial number anyway.

This isn't the first time that they've allowed IDs to be rewritten. But I reckon that they provided the functionality, in case they needed it.
If I'm not mistaken, nobody found the purpose for it, until someone found the service jig and memory stick. :/

I believe that people provide functionality to make things easier for themselves and users. However, it's because people keep abusing the system that we get layers and layers of additional checks of security.

 

I don't recall seeing proof of UMD-R and UMD-RW discs, drives to write them, or that anyone ever reverse engineered and reproduced the physical media.
Edit: This level of detail is over my head, but a quick search pointed me to juicy info. http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/ECMA-365.pdf

 

Considering software only piracy was a thing so early in the PSP's life did anyone even bother looking at the UMD format itself?

 

the disc itself is AES encrypted decrypted by Spock, I have published the keys, so theoretically we could press our own UMD assuming we had the right hardware, practically it's useless though.

 

Interesting... I'm surprised that there hasn't been any images of the UMD burner/presser leaked :O