If you've been looking into the homebrew/emu scene in PSP gaming, you may have noticed that there are launchers starting to come out that let you boot PSP games off memory stick. What I found intriguing is the huge difference in loading times for some games. One of the PSP games I own, Untold Legends, is rendered nearly unplayable because of load times. You have about a 20 second load when you go into new areas, or 20 second loads when you warp too and from town. There is a *lot* of loading in the game. But I've read that playing the game off the memory stick reduces loading to around 3 to 5 seconds. That is a hell of a big difference!!! If the UMD seek time is so slow this could be the next best thing to reduce PSP loading times. 3 to 5 seconds is not that big of a deal. So has anyone heard of any word of PSP develoepers planning to do this? I think it could work as a great solution to help reduce PSP loading times. Now, granted, not all of them are bad, but there are quite a few that have long, long loading. I mean, look at Midnight Club 3. 60-70 second loading! That is just ridiculous!
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Will PSP developers start caching games off the mem stick to reduce loading?
- Thread starter Mrbob
- Start date
Brofist
Member
Just rip your games and do it yourself 
Hell you can take it one step further and rip your UMD to an iso, and then rip the dummy files out of your iso. Untold Legends is like 350MB like that. I tend to use the actual UMD in the drive of the game I'm playing off the MS to boot the games from the fastloader (even though technically any UMD will do). Makes me feel better about myself heh
Hell you can take it one step further and rip your UMD to an iso, and then rip the dummy files out of your iso. Untold Legends is like 350MB like that. I tend to use the actual UMD in the drive of the game I'm playing off the MS to boot the games from the fastloader (even though technically any UMD will do). Makes me feel better about myself heh
Initially caching on MS wasn't allowed but Sony has opened up that option to developers. I do hope that some developers would take the initiative to support such feature soon. As for different people have different size memory stick, all game has to do is only turn on the support if there's enough space required by the game for caching. But still, it's an extra headache and potential TRC issues they have to go through much like not all games on Xbox support caching.
kpop100 said:Just rip your games and do it yourself
Hell you can take it one step further and rip your UMD to an iso, and then rip the dummy files out of your iso. Untold Legends is like 350MB like that. I tend to use the actual UMD in the drive of the game I'm playing off the MS to boot the games from the fastloader (even though technically any UMD will do). Makes me feel better about myself heh
Well, that is the thing which drives me nuts. I've looked into the file sizes of many of the PSP games out there, and not only could caching work you could store the whole game on your memory stick! Most PSP games are a waste of the UMD disc in regards to size. Not even close to filling up the 1.8 gig disc. Many don't even fill 10 percent.
The homebrew scene has the luxury of working in a "user beware" environment whereas licensed developers for closed platforms like consoles or handhelds, as an overall group, have never been particularly keen on providing the enduser with this level of software configurability, probably exactly for the reasons that Rugalz mentions. It's certainly nice to know that the option is now open to PSP developers, but I wouldn't expect many of them to take advantage of the option.
The easiest thing to do would be to simply let the game be copied to Memstick in its entirety and played from there, much like what all the PSP loaders do now. But that would be an approach fraught with concerns from the standpoint of licensed devs - most importantly being that it basically sets the table for pirates. Not sure how many devs really want to think through all the issues as thoroughly as needed just to get a particular project out the door.
The easiest thing to do would be to simply let the game be copied to Memstick in its entirety and played from there, much like what all the PSP loaders do now. But that would be an approach fraught with concerns from the standpoint of licensed devs - most importantly being that it basically sets the table for pirates. Not sure how many devs really want to think through all the issues as thoroughly as needed just to get a particular project out the door.
kaching said:
This is one thing I wish PSP UMD drive has write once capability. If it did then allowing games to be copied to MS in its entirety wouldn't be such a big deal. The way I think it could work is when you buy a game, you can play the game as is, like we do now. Or optionally you can install the game to MS minus the executable. But when you install the game, the UMD is written with your PSP identification so installing to another PSP won't be allowed. (But you can still play the game from UMD on another PSP) I think something along the line like this could work nicely although it'll confused the hell out of used game market... But, on the flip side, it could encourage people to buy new games...
sonycowboy
Member
This will be much more common once the HDD based PSP's hit in the future
Ah, if only we could go back to the days when copy protection was done by asking you track down the nth word on the page xx of the game's user manual
Your idea is great and I've actually hoped myself to see something like that, but I think its the kind of thing that relies on the platform owner to make as simple and foolproof as possible (or simply a requirement) in order to see it applied in widespread fashion. I seem to recall seeing something about each PSP being uniquely identifiable (they all have MAC Addresses, at the very least) so it seems like the basic requirements are there and its more a question of will to implement more than anything else.
Your idea is great and I've actually hoped myself to see something like that, but I think its the kind of thing that relies on the platform owner to make as simple and foolproof as possible (or simply a requirement) in order to see it applied in widespread fashion. I seem to recall seeing something about each PSP being uniquely identifiable (they all have MAC Addresses, at the very least) so it seems like the basic requirements are there and its more a question of will to implement more than anything else.
Yeah, I thought of this, but according to various people, it does not work.DarienA said:
The first problem is that the game is over 1.6gb and only fits on a 2gb memstick. Secondly, even if you have a massive memory stick, there are no loaders that work with the game. If there was any game that needed help, it's MC3. I wonder if the large size is at fault for such slow data seeking? I doubt they duplicated data to allow for faster seek times as the game was always quite large, so it probably has to do a lot of work to pull data from the UMD. With no seek times, the memory sticks would probably cut it down to just 5-6 seconds.