Sometimes emulation is less about functionality and more about 'look at me -- look what I did!' PlayStation emulation on iPhone falls into the latter category. While the excitement of booting up Snake's first solid adventure on your iPhone can't be denied, actually setting your thumbs upon the screen to control 18 distinct commands (8 directions, 4 face buttons, 4 shoulder buttons, start, and select) is gonna be a chore -- good luck even getting a glimpse of the action. Nevertheless, ZodTTD, the developer behind the 'gpSPhone' GameBoy Advance emulator for iPhone/iPod touch, is hard at work on the 'psx4iphone' emulator. While there's still much work to be done, as current pre-beta screens attest (see above), Zod claims a beta could be rolled out in a matter of days depending on demand ... and donations, no doubt.

The target is to have psx4iphone compatible with 75% of the PS1 catalog, which "may not include your favorite game." So would it be asking too much to request DualShock support?

[Via Engadget]

Sometimes it feels like hackers do things just to prove that they can rather than for any actual useful purpose. Case in point, Japanese homebrew developer SofiyaCat has set up a minimally-functional DS emulator on a hacked PSP. The compatibility is reportedly spotty and the emulation runs extremely slowly, but you can count on the community to improve these problems in due time.

It might seem pointless to emulate the DS on a system that only has a single, non-touch screen but ... well actually it is pretty pointless. But it is possible, and that's all that matters sometimes.

[Via DSFanboy]

Well that was fast. It was just Saturday that hackers at Noobz found a buffer overflow exploit in the puzzle classic Lumines that allowed hackers to run a simple Hello World program on any PSP firmware, including the recently released version 3.5. By Sunday, our blogging brethren at PSPFanboy caught the above screengrab of Amazon's Movers and Shakers page showing the game's sales jumping a ludicrous 5900 percent in just one day. As of this posting Monday morning, the same page shows a more moderate 750 percent rise pushing the two-year-old title to the second-highest spot on Amazon's video game sales charts.

We understand that there are a lot of people out there that want to exploit this new, uh, exploit to run homebrew code on their PSPs. What we don't understand is how there can be so many PSP owners out there that don't already own Lumines. How do you buy a PSP and not immediately pick up this hauntingly beautiful musical puzzler? We suppose there could be some PSP owners out there who eschew UMDs altogether for legally questionable emulators, but really, if you need a firmware hack to justify shelling out a few bucks for such sublime puzzle goodness then we don't want to be your friend anymore.

You young whippersnappers today have it so easy. Hard drives... downloadable content... power buttons right on your the wireless controller! Back in my day you actually had to get up and put a cartridge in the system when you wanted a new game. Of course, that's not so easy for me anymore, what with the rheumatism and all. And don't get me started on blowing in the dang things ...

What's that? You say there's a new flash cart that lets you store multiple NES games on a single cartridge? You say you can put hundreds of ROMs on a standard CompactFlash card and play them through the standard NES hardware? You say my days of getting up to put in Clu Clu Land are over?

We'll see about that. I'll just adjust the old InterWeb browser and ... $135! Do ya think, I'm made of money? Back in my day $135 would buy you a brand new Cadillac sedan with enough left over for a fancy dinner at Roxy's. Why even today I could use that money to buy 57 27 [update: us old folks make typos too] legally downloaded NES games for my Wii. Stop wasting my time.

[Via insertcredit]

The Capcom CPS-3 arcade board only ran a handful of games, including JoJo's Venture, Street Fighter III, and Red Earth, but that hasn't stopped the emulation community from cracking the board's code, which puts them one step closer to emulating the board itself. And considering CPS-3 debuted in 1996, it's about time!

Posts on Haze's Mame WIP as well as the more technical-oriented Notas de Andy (translation) show that the decryption has opened up the developers to make further progress, as David Haywood has already gotten the two JoJo games to "execute some of the game code, rather than just bios." We look forward to watching their progress.

[Via Engadget]

The inimitable Ben Heck is taking his considerable console building talents and going pro. Well, maybe "pro" isn't the exact right word, but he's lent his design skills, as well as his portable handheld naming skills, to the Gameport handheld system. The device is just a prototype, so we have no information on availability or price, but we do know it should pack a 5-hour battery life, a 480 by 234 pixel screen, a video-out for playing on your television, SD card support (for storing your games, et al), and a USB 1.1 port for loading the thing up. Their goal is to create a system that reproduces the original experience of the 8-bit classics as closely as possible and, with open source software, encourage a development community to grow around the platform. Check out Ben on GameTrailer's GameOne and jump ahead to the last segment for some video of the Gameport.

[Via Engadget]

Fresh off the PSP homebrew press: an emulator that plays classic Game Boy games -- in full color! Created by a programmer called Brunni, the emulator is still in beta and isn't likely to be released for some time (Brunni likes things to be perfect). From the looks of it, this is more than a Super Game Boy-esque palette swap. A shaky-cam video (after the jump) shows Super Mario Land in crisp, colorful detail.

Everyone should know that we're big fans of Zork here at Joystiq HQ (it's one of the 10 most important games, remember?). So it's doubly exciting to see this map pop up all over the place today. At first blush, it may appear to be a charming, hand-drawn map of Infocom's seminal text-adventure game, but upon closer inspection it doesn't match up. Why? Because it's a map of the mainframe version of Dungeon, the antecedent to Zork, "equivalent to Zork I + about half of Zork II + the endgame of Zork III." Better still, there's DOS, Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux versions to go along with the map, so there's no excuse not to play it!

[Via Cathode Tan]

We're not sure exactly how to transform your video-playing Apple TV into an emulation station just yet, but we do know that there's an awful lot of Apple TV hacking going on and the above video purports to show a very functional copy of Super Mario Bros. running off the tiny little box.

AwkwardTV has a page set up listing some emulators that work with the Apple TV writing, "These emulators are being tested with standard ROM's on the AppleTV running the original OS except for being slightly modified to add SSH." Is anyone tired enough of waiting for Apple's inevitable game offerings to upgrade their Apple TV themself?

[Via TUAW]

There's simply no escaping NES games these days. If you're not downloading them from the Wii shop, you're likely playing them on an emulator (because you own the original ROMS, right?) or quite possibly, the Xbox 360. An XNA enthusiast has just released the second iteration of XNA SharpNES, an Xbox 360 port of Jonathan Turner's original emulator.

Provided you belong to the XNA Creator's Club (that's $99 per year) and have all the necessary software to compile the code, you can load the emulator onto the 360 and happily play the likes of Super Mario Bros., Mega Man and Gyromite. Of course, there's no telling how long it'll take before the emulator is pounded into the dirt by a gavel -- paying Microsoft to play Nintendo games on the Xbox 360 just seems fundamentally wrong.

You know, like owning a copy of Gyromite. Care to explain that?

[Via Engadget, Xbox-Scene]

Forget PSone, Sony should have worked out a deal with Sega to emulate Dreamcast on PSP. Instead, we're starting to see some attempts by publishers to revisit some of their Dreamcast titles using the UMD format. First, Capcom did Power Stone Collection, and now, Sega has announced Crazy Taxi: Fare Wars, built from Crazy Taxi 1 & 2.

While Fare Wares offers a new *Ad Hoc* multiplayer mode, we'd gladly trade the additional content for straight-up ports; if it meant we'd be downloading the games and playing them via emulation. Is this just wishful thinking?

[Via press release]

Dark_AleX has released another edition of his custom PSP firmware. Just as it appears '3.03 Open Edition Revision A' (OE-A) is essentially a modified version of Sony's official v3.03 fimware. 3.03OE-A also comes with a modified version of Sony's PS1 emulator, popstation; and with this latest custom firmware release, custom-made ISOs (game files) can now be compressed to conserve memory stick space.

Ethical concerns aside, it's amazing how the PSP homebrew scene has exploded ahead of Sony, unlocking the company's emulator for use with all PS1 titles. With just a few hours of research, a stack of old PlayStation games on hand, and perhaps a little trial and error, you now have the power to forge your own emulation experience -- imagine that. You don't even need a PlayStation 3.

Update: clarified that popstation is a modified version of Sony's PS1 emulator.

We won't be satisfied until every Xbox title is compatible on 360, but today's backwards compatibility update is a major step in that direction. Sure, we knew the patch was coming, but it's a relief that it's here, Pyschonauts now playable -- as are Shenmue II, Indigo Prophecy, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, Dead or Alive Ultimate, Buffy, Destroy All Humans, and others.

The update's final list of games also features some additional surprises (unrevealed during the premature posting on Xbox.com), most notably Soul Calibur 2 (North America only) and Conker: Live and Reloaded. Still, each of these bc updates is bitter sweet, inevitably lacking games we've been longing for. It's been a year, and still no Panzer Dragoon Orta?

For a brief moment in time, an updated version of the Xbox 360's backwards compatibility list was exposed for all the internet to see. Though it was yanked in a matter of minutes, one new entry stood out like an atomic mushroom cloud in a serene, children's playground. Not to imply that Psychonauts is capable of melting children or flooding large masses of land with deadly radiation, but its presence was rather devastating to the psyche.

In case you weren't aware (and clearly you aren't much of the time), Tim Schafer and his team at Double Fine did extraordinary things with Psychonauts, managing to take the seemingly incompatible platformer and adventure genres and mash them together like two pieces of clay. That's before they twisted the whole mess into a variety of amusing shapes.

Oh, there's a whole bunch of other new games too. However, when asked about the exact release date of this December update, Microsoft warned us that the list is not final. "We'll have more news soon -- as I'm sure you're aware with any software development, things can change at any time so we want to make an announcement when we're sure we've got the final, solid list."

View the non-final, slightly wobbly list of additions after the break.

[Thanks Nick! Thanks to Richard from Xbox 360 Fanboy for remembering to take a screenshot.]

As Sony no doubt scrambles to roll out PSP firmware v3.02, homebrew enthusiasts (and pirates too) are currently enjoying the benefits of 3.01 -- PlayStation (1) downloads! Just days after the release of DevHook v1.50, comes 1.51, expanding firmware support from 2.82 to 3.01.

Opinions remain split over the value of DevHook. While responsible users enjoy freely traversing the homebrew and commercial scenes, there's no denying that DevHook is also used to play pirated dumps of retail games, in turn, driving Sony to release its ceaseless barrage of security updates.

[Via PSP Fanboy]