The PlayStation Classic may not be an excellent way to spend $99 but now that it’s being discounted to around half of that price on Amazon ($54.99), it may be a more appealing purchase. As it’s very easy to hack, its hacking scene is pretty active and is seeing a lot of great things like a PSP emulator, a tool to boot directly into RetroArch and some important features promised for BleemSync 1.0!
PPSSPP ported to the PlayStation Classic
Back in the day, the PSP was a pretty big hit with many gamers even though its successor, the PSVita, saw less success. Nowadays, its graphics are a bit dated but it’s seen a revival in popularity through emulation and now, the PlayStation Classic got its own port of the go-to PSP emulator named PPSSPP!
Thanks to PPSSPP, you’ll be able to play some awesome PSP games like BurnOut Legends or you could play some Project Diva if that’s more your thing! 
According to reports on Reddit and a spreadsheet on Google Drive, the emulator runs decently and the following titles seem to run well:
- Patapon
- LocoRoco
- Street Fighter Alpha 3 MAX
- An unspecified Burnout game
- Crisis Core – Final Fantasy 7 from a YouTube video
- According to Swingflip, PPSSPP’s performance on the PSC is better than that found on the SNES Classic or Raspberry Pi 3 Model B
To grab the PPSSPP emulator, which is provided as a RetroArch core, simply head over to this link and download the ZIP file provided. You might need to enable “Block Transfer GPU” to remove graphical issues in certain games. Some titles, like Tekken 6, do not work so your mileage may vary.
PSC_RetroBoot version 0.2 – A tool to boot directly into RetroArch
If you think you played enough PlayStation 1 games for now, you’ll be happy to know that you can boot your PlayStation Classic directly into RetroArch so you can start playing games for other consoles straight away!
Did you buy a PlayStation Classic solely to hack and use non-PlayStation 1 emulators on? If so, PSC_RetroBoot is an ideal tool for you as it directly boots your console into RetroArch.
Among the features that PSC_RetroBoot has, we find:
- Direct booting into RetroArch, duh!
- Ability to play the 20 built-in games as this runs off USB without modifying the pre-loaded files
- Game scanning and playlist creation capabililties
- Two RetroArch cores namely PPSSPP and Mupen64Plus
- To grab more RetroArch cores, check out this link
To get this small yet useful tool, head over to this Reddit thread and grab the provided ZIP file. To use PSC_RetroBoot, get a pendrive, format it as FAT32/EXT4, name the volume you created SONY and copy over the files of the ZIP!
BleemSync 1.0 to have NTFS/exFAT support
The days of using FAT32-formatted BleemSync sticks will soon be over thanks to upcoming NTFS/exFAT support!
As of right now, BleemSync only supports FAT32 and EXT4-formatted pen drives and while these are enough for most use-cases, they aren’t an ideal selection especially when you consider that most will use FAT32. To remedy this, BleemSync 1.0 will also support NTFS and exFAT which are vastly superior file systems that have less major issues that can also provide better performance!
FAT32 is an ancient filesystem that has stayed mostly unchanged since 1996 when 2GB hard drives were the norm, is prone to file corruption on certain pen drives especially if there are system freezes and has the notorious 4GB file size limit which might present problems later on if some software needs to use large files (maybe like a SheepShaver port!).
BleemSync 1.0 is set to release in the near future but it already missed its ‘next week’ ETA that Swingflip gave on January 7, 2019. It’s important to note that FAT32 will still have to be used for the first boot of BleemSync but afterwards, you’ll be able to use a better filesystem.
Conclusion
Undoubtedly, the most anticipated thing in the PlayStation Classic community right now is BleemSync 1.0 but even if you’re eagerly waiting for it, the best thing to do is to stay put and wait. After all, BleemSync 1.0 will be a pretty major release so perhaps waiting a bit more in order to get a stable release with few to no issues isn’t so bad after all!
Wololo might receive some commissions when you purchase items from affiliate links such as the PlayStation Classic purchase link in the introductory paragraph.
The post Recent PlayStation Classic News: PPSSPP (PSP emulator) port released, tool to directly boot into RetroArch released and BleemSync to get exFAT and NTFS support! appeared first on Wololo.net.