PPSSPP

• Henrik Rydgård
• ppsspp
• 2026-05-16
• 1.20.4 is out! It's an unusually big followup release, big enough to get its own announcement page. Given the recent development in the adhoc multiplayer space, we needed to get something out to cover the long gap to 1.21, which is planned for Christmas. Download now!

Changes in 1.20.4

Ad-hoc live status display

The biggest change is that adhoc servers can now have live status displayed directly in the app, where you can see what games are being played, and by who. Not all servers support this yet, however. If you are a server owner and want to support it, see this page.

UI improvements

Our RetroAchievements support can now handle subsets in a better way - on the achievements screen, they end up on different tab pages, making it far more manageable to browse achievements. On desktop, you can now type-to-search on all three main tabs, and in the cheat list interface. The "Auto" screen rotation mode on Android now overrides the OS screen rotation lock.

New features

Deep links are now supported on iOS, this may be useful for some front-end users. 7z files can now be automatically decompressed.

Important bug fixes

• GPU texture upscaling was previously partially broken on most mobile devices, it would sometimes stop upscaling for no reason. This has been fixed. Additionally, two new texture upscalers have been added, NNEDI3 (neural upscaling) and Spline36.
• A long-standing crash bug affecting games like GTA occasionally, but much more often when modded with higher poly assets, has been fixed.
• Lens flares now occlude properly in the Syphon Filter games. This was previously stated to be fixed, but an important case was missed - the game draws a lot of geometry with backface culling off, which was drawn with backface culling on to our software Z-buffer, causing missed occlusions.
• The file and image browsers stopped working on some rare devices. This has been fixed.

And more!

For a more complete list of fixes, see the release page. Enjoy!

• Henrik Rydgård
• ppsspp
• 2026-03-03
• PPSSPP 1.20 is here - or actually 1.20.1, due to a build system mishap I had to increment the version immediately. Get it on the download page for PC or Mac! If you're on Android and already have it installed from Google Play, your update will arrive within a week (to catch crashes early). PPSSPP 1.20.3 has now been rolled out, with some important bugfixes, including the iOS multitouch bug and background setting bugs. 1.20.2 also introduces an improved ad hoc server list. See the detailed list of changes since the 1.19.x series, and the 1.20.x updates.

iOS bug alert!

The iOS version 1.20.1 has broken multitouch in OpenGL mode. Update to the latest instead. Download now!

Changes in 1.20

Major UI improvements

The UI has been re-engineered to support both landscape and portrait layouts - previously landscape layout was simply squished into portrait which didn't look good nor did it work well. Additionally, screen rotation support has been added to the iOS version, which previously lacked it. Also, now touch control layouts and the display layout configuration are separate between portrait and landscape, which simply makes sense. A large number of icons have been drawn and added to the UI, which makes it friendlier and easier to navigate (and they're now resolution-independent, so look sharper).

Ad hoc multiplayer - support for "relay servers"

Relay servers, or "aemu postoffice", are a new innovation in the PSP ad hoc multiplayer space - they make it far easier to configure, since you no longer have to mess with opening ports in your firewall etc. These are now automatically used for popular servers, and for other servers you can choose whether to try to use them or not. For a technical overview, see the aemu postoffice design doc.

Rendering and performance fixes

Multiple graphical fixes have been done for Tales of Phantasia X, which recently received an English translation patch. VSync now works a bit differently - you almost always want to have it on now. If you had it off before, try turning it on and making sure that "Low latency display" is on. Brave Story performance has been drastically improved - if you used a lower resolution to play this game before, feel free to crank it up again. A major glitch has been fixed in ATV: Offroad fury. Curiously this was caused by a rare CPU emulation bug, and only happened on ARM64 processors. Outrun 2006 no longer has slowdowns, no more need to overclock emulation.

Smooth playback mode for audio

In Audio settings, you'll find the new "smooth" playback mode. This greatly reduces glitches when there are slowdowns in games, due to slow file access or background tasks on Android, or just insufficient performance. Since it slightly increases audio latency, it's not on by default, but on lower performance devices it really improves the experience.

Windows for ARM64 is now supported

It already mostly worked fine, but now this version is now officially supported and a few fixes have been made, so it can now be considered finished and supported. If you're using one of the new Snapdragon laptops, this is good news.

Android support

Unfortunately, due to changes in the Android platform, we had to drop support for the very oldest versions of Android. However, Android 5.0 and forward is still supported, and I don't anticipate raising the floor again anytime soon. Android 5 was released 12 years ago in 2014, so that's still pretty good support!

Controller fixes

There's now native support for DualShock, DualSense and experimental support for Switch Pro controllers on Windows. These previously had various glitches or didn't work at all - now they all work, and you can even get tilt input from DualSense.

Important regression fixes

A crash in 7th Dragon has been fixed, music is working again in Tony Hawk's Project 8, and adhoc multiplayer works again in the Syphon Filter games.

Other improvements

There's also been a large amount of smaller improvements, see the full list in the news item! And much more!

• Henrik Rydgård
• ppsspp
• 2025-06-05
• PPSSPP 1.19 is now available! Get it on the download page for PC or Mac! If you're on Android and already have it installed from Google Play, your update will arrive within a week (to catch crashes early). On iOS, the release will take a little more time due to the Apple review process. Download now!

Important fixes in 1.19

For the detailed list of changes, see the news item.

Re-engineered Atrac3+ music player

Atrac3+ is one of Sony's proprietary compressed audio format, and it's widely used in PSP games for audio. Playback is done through a pretty abstract library that is built into the PSP firmware, but often is also shipped on disc. Our previous implementation was mostly based on guesswork and vibes, but this time I've reverse engineered in detail how it works, mainly through intense testing on hardware. This has fixed a large number of long-standing compatibility problems - for example, the music in Flatout now finally works correctly. Additionally, some other tricky uses of Atrac3+ playback now work better, such as using it through the sceSas mixer.

Support for "Infrastructure" multiplayer

Previously, there were a few "forks" of PPSSPP going on adding support for connecting to resurrected multiplayer servers for certain games. Mainly, one made by ANR2ME. Now the official versions of PPSSPP has this built-in, and with automatic configuration! See Infrastructure. Also, a few ad hoc-related bugs were squashed, thanks ANR2ME for helping track those down, too.

New ImGui-based debugger

PPSSPP now has a native built-in cross-platform debugger, ImDebugger. It supports stepping through both CPU code and GPU draw calls.

Many rendering and performance fixes

As usual there have been a plethora of fixes, including Persona 1/2 battle transitions, smoke effects in Jak'n'Daxter, lens flare fixes in multiple games, performance improvements in Motorstorm and Outrun, etc. Also there have been a lot of performance and crash fixes in the UI.

"LLE" some modules

We have now switched over to loading and actually running a few modules/libraries that games ship on disc, instead of simulating them. These are scePsmf and sceCcc. Especially our implementation of the former had some serious bugs, like the one that caused Socom Fireteam Bravo 3 to crash - now that bug is just gone. And much more!

• Henrik Rydgård
• ppsspp
• 2024-11-03

PPSSPP 1.18.1 - announcement and progress report

PPSSPP 1.18.1 is now out, find downloads on the download page! WARNING: There is a critical metadata parsing bug in 1.18 that may affect many devices when running homebrew apps and demos, or even having them in your folder. This is fixed in 1.18.1. If you're on Android and already have it installed from Google Play, your update will arrive within a week (to catch crashes early). iOS will also receive the update on the App Store. Howevwer, the Apple Store review process has been problematic recently (if this continues, a lengthy write-up is coming...), so it may take a quite long time before it's up, unfortunately. For details on the changes, see the news item. Download now!

Additional fixes in 1.18.1

• Crashfix in PBP reader (homebrew/demos) (#19580)
• Fix minor theme issue in the Homebrew Store (#19582)

Important fixes in 1.18

• iOS support is now official and has been greatly improved, compared to old side-loaded builds. It's now nearly feature complete, only missing microphone emulation and a few minor UX things like easily setting a background image in the menu. A lot of iOS-specific optimizations have been implemented to keep performance as good as possible, even though we can't use JIT.
• A lot of potential crashes have been fixed, both in-game and in the UI
• A number of rendering and video playback problems have been fixed
• Input changes: More mappable actions, the AxisSwap feature has been fixed
• UI changes: Game info can be reached in-game, you can install savegames directly from zip files, etc
• The Android VR build got "immersive mode" which makes better use of the built-in motion compensation, and many other fixes. Lubos explans it in this video.
• And of course a huge amount of small bugfixes and performance improvements around the code base. Enjoy!

• Henrik Rydgård
• ppsspp
• 2024-01-26

PPSSPP 1.17 - release announcement and progress report

PPSSPP 1.17 is now out! Get it on the download page! If you're on Android and already have it installed from Google Play, your update will arrive within a week (to catch crashes early). For fine details, see the news item. Download now!

Beta program

For the first time, you can now sign up to receive beta versions automatically. This is easier and safer than installing APKs from the buildbot, and you make a valuable contribution to development. See details here.

CHD support

CHD was originally a format for compressing hard drives from arcade games in MAME, but has since became the most popular format for storing ISOs for CD- and DVD-based video game consoles. PSP already has a different format, CSO, which can be used to similarly loss-lessly compress ISOs, and as a bonus, unlike CHD, these actually work on the real hardware. So you might ask, why support CHD? It does provide a slightly better compression ratio, but the main reason is that it's simply been requested a lot. Many people seem to familiarize themselves with a set of tools, and since CHD works to compress ISOs for most other systems, people just want to stick with it. So now we support it. IMPORTANT! You MUST use the createdvd command from recent versions of chdman to generate your CHDs. createcd will work but there will be severe performance problems (EDIT: These have been fixed in 1.18.1). See issue #18798. Example command line: chdman createdvd -i "Grand Theft Auto - Vice City Stories.ISO" -o GTA_VCS_dvd.chd

Important fixes in 1.17

• Several serious hangs and crashes that could happen when switching away from the app, especially from the pause screen, have been fixed.
• Multiple rendering issues have been fixed, and rendering performance has been further optimized.
• PPSSPP now tracks total time played per game, you can check it in the info screen for each game (long press the icon).
• Some new UI features, like the ability to keep the game running behind the pause menu overlay.
• Many input fixes, especially around deadzone handling for both analog stick and tilt control.
• Many bugfixes around texture replacement.
• Input latency has been greatly improved on the SDL build with Vulkan. Don't use OpenGL on Linux if you can avoid it.
• For RetroAchievements, renamed the Challenge mode to Hardcore mode and made it the default, as is standard. For a more detailed changelog, see the release notes.

• Henrik Rydgård
• ppsspp
• 2023-09-09

PPSSPP 1.16 - release announcement and progress report

PPSSPP 1.16 is now out! Get it on the download page! PPSSPP 1.16.1-6 were also released, with some important hang and crash fixes. For fine details, see the news item.

RetroAchievements support

RetroAchievements is a long-running project to add "achievements", similar to Xbox Achievements or Playstation Trophies, to game for old video game consoles, in order to add extra challenges and improve replayability, and also making the whole experience feel a bit more modern. In 1.16, PPSSPP adds full support for RetroAchievements. On the System tab in settings, you can now click RetroAchievements to reach a dialog where you can log in to your RA account. You can't register the account directly from within PPSSPP though, as it's an external service. RetroAchievements has a very passionate community and is getting more and more popular. Unfortunately, achievement definitions are not yet available for all games, and on the PSP they're often only available for a single regional version of a game, so watch out for that if you want to try it. To check, on the RetroAchievements website when browsing games, you can check the "Supported Game Files" link on a game's page to see which UMD you'll need to acquire and dump.

Important fixes in 1.16

• A lot of people on Android 13 devices ended up in a situation where the choose-a-folder dialog during set up didn't work correctly. This has been fixed.
• Multiple input event handling fixes, should help with external joysticks
• Perf improvements on lower end devices by disabling ubershaders
• Multiple fixes for glitches like flicker in WWE vs Smackdown 2006, shadows in Motorstorm, etc.
• Lots of additional performance improvements and fixes
• Multiple bugfixes around texture replacement, fixing Tactics Ogre fonts among other things

New JIT backends by [Unknown]

A background development that most people won't notice yet, but will have long-term performance benefits in addition to compatibility with more CPU architectures, is the addition of new IR-based JIT compiler backends. PPSSPP has long supported recompiling the PSP's MIPS code to an easier-to-interpret intermediate representation which we call IR, in order to speed up platforms where we can't always JIT-compile like iOS. This IR is not only easier for the CPU to interpret than raw MIPS instructions, but can also easily be processed through optimization passes, which can thus be general across architectures. We've long had a plan to eventually try to compile the IR to native code, which would gain the benefit of general optimization passes, while still producing really fast native code. When starting his RISC-V backend, [Unknown] chose to use this approach, and then proceeded to write x86/x86-64 and ARM64 backends, too. Currently, these are at parity or a bit faster than the existing JITs, but much less tested which is why they're not yet selectable in the UI.

Correct emulation of vrnd by fp64

fp64 has been working on trying to reverse engineer accurate implementations of some of the more obscure math instructions of the PSP's VFPU, a custom little SIMD coprocessor. Previously he solved sin/cos/sqrt among others, now the turn came to the vrnd instruction. Surprisingly it seems to consist of a mix of multiple traditional random number generators. Some details can be found in this issue on github.

• Henrik Rydgård
• ppsspp
• 2023-05-22
• The 1.15.x release series has been out now for a couple of weeks, including some point-releases. These have been made mostly as direct response to crash reports but also for some other fixes. Time to summarize!
• Overall crash rate is down by about 20% from previous releases
• It took three point-releases to get there though! A few new crashes emerged in this release, but I also fixed some old ones while at it.
• People seem generally happy with the release, but there have been some negative reviews coming in, mostly about slowdown on older devices, control mapping problems, and even about how the new icon is ugly. Thus, a fourth point-release is rolling out about now, 1.15.4, with the following changes:
• Some optimizations to claw back most of the lost performance
• The Android device resolution / HW scaler setting will be back
• Fixes for running things directly out of the Downloads folder using the Load button on newer Android versions
• Fixes for some control mapping problems
• On devices that don't understand the new icon format, use the old icon instead of an ugly auto-generated one.
• Fix loader bug triggered by WWE 2009, preventing it from starting
• Tilt control gets back a lost setting (inverse deadzone, or "low end radius")
• A couple of updates to compat.ini. Hopefully this will be enough to avoid a fifth! While looking at performance to eliminate some regressions, I found plenty of additional room for improvements, and I have a bunch of good changes pending. Mostly though, these will need serious testing so I cannot merge them until after we're done with the main series of 1.15.x releases, to keep things simple. But expect serious performance improvements on old devices in 1.16! Anyway, enjoy!