How to Play PPSSPP Games (PSP) on Android in 2024

In this article, we covered a complete guide on how to play PPSSPP games on Android. We have added screenshots and video tutorials that teach you ways to play any PSP game on your Android Smartphone.

When you think of portable gaming devices, what comes to mind? Perhaps the Gameboy Color or Gameboy Advance of your childhood, homes to classic games like Pokemon Red Version and Blue Version or The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap.

About PSP Games and Playing Them on Android

You might be thinking of the Nintendo DS, the successor to the Gameboy that maintained its popularity in the 2000s thanks to an incredible lineup of video games, ranging from blockbusters like Mario Kart DS and Animal Crossing: Wild World to acclaimed niche titles. critics like The World Ends With You or Radiant Historia.

Perhaps its gaming history dates back even further, to the 1979 Microvision console or Nintendo’s Game & Watch series of dedicated handheld devices. Or maybe you’re newer to video games, and when you think of a handheld console, your mind immediately jumps to Nintendo’s handheld 3DS console, or to their new convertible console, the Nintendo Switch.

The handheld gaming market has long been dominated by Nintendo, but forgetting about Sony’s own handheld systems would be a huge mistake.

Although both the Playstation Portable (or PSP) and the PS Vita weren’t considered a huge success compared to Nintendo’s dominance in the handheld market, both consoles have their own selection of critically acclaimed games that any gamer has to offer.

Although the Vita is still on sale today – despite a lack of first-hand support from Sony – the PSP has long been retired, and thus the emulation market for the device has waned. made stronger every year.

Thanks to emulation, it’s easier than ever to play some classic PSP games on the go right on your Android device. The market for PSP emulators isn’t as strong as we’ve seen for emulators like the Gameboy Advance or even the Nintendo DS, but there are some great selections in the Google Play game store that can load your PSP games right into your device for the perfect on-the-go game.

Let’s take a look at the best emulator for gaming on the go, and how you can load your favorite games onto your phone to play at home or on your commute to work. Here is how to play PSP games on your Android device. but there are some great selections in the Google Play game store that can load your PSP games right on your device for the perfect on-the-go game.

Let’s take a look at the best emulator for gaming on the go, and how you can load your favorite games onto your phone to play at home or on your commute to work. Here is how to play PSP games on your Android device.

Which Emulators to use (and which ones to avoid)

So far, according to numerous reviews and testimonies; the best emulator to play PSP games on Android is PPSSPP Gold. It’s fast and user-friendly. Above all, it supports a wide range of PSP games.

One of the great advantages of using Android as your preferred mobile platform over iOS is the ability to download games and applications that might not be allowed in the Apple App Store for iOS.

For example, emulators, which can be found in large numbers available on the Play Store for almost all video game consoles from the 2000s and earlier.

In a general sense, an emulator is a piece of hardware or software that allows one computer system to act like another computer system. (more on Wikipedia).

Although there are all kinds of emulators available for computer systems – MS-DOS emulators, Apple II emulators, and even Windows 95 emulators. that can work directly in your browser or on your Apple Watch – the most popular variety of emulators online today are in fact emulators that allow you to play your old video games on platforms they were not originally designed for.

For example, you can use the emulation to play The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past on your Windows 10 computer, or Spyro the Dragon on your MacBook Pro.

Although there were some solutions for running emulators on closed platforms like iOS, Android is really the only mobile platform on the market today with an active emulation market.

There are dozens of emulators on the Play Store, ranging from PPSSPP Emulator, PPSSPP Gold, NES, and SNES emulation to Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advance emulators.

We have already talked about how to play Nintendo DS games using an emulator on Android, something you can read about here. In general, the emulation on Android depends on the power of your phone or tablet; Even in 2017, you’ll want to make sure you have powerful enough hardware to handle the intensity of the emulation.

Although you may look at older games and assume they don’t require a lot of power to run, thanks to the power of emulation and the fact that your device is forced to run software not originally designed for it, you may be surprised at how exhausting it is. it can become emulation on your device.

The PSP turns out to be a console that is somewhere in the middle. It’s not the hardest video game console to emulate, far from it, but it’s not the easiest to emulate either, especially when it comes to playing these games on low-end hardware. Emulating more graphically intense games, such as God of War: Chains of Olympus, can often cause large amounts of slowdown or crash, and make it difficult to play on your smartphone or tablet.

That said, there are a fair number of lower-end PSP games out there, including Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions, Persona 3 Portable, and Valkyria Chronicles 3. which are known to work well in emulators (though as long as you’re using hardware powerful enough to get the job done).

Using PPSSPP Gold to Play PSP Games on Android

When it comes to choosing a PSP emulator, your choice in use is really quite limited. Searching for a PSP emulator on the Play Store will bring you dozens of results, but most of those apps are not so good, and very dangerous to install on your phone at worst.

Google has done a great job of removing most of the dangerous content from its online app store, but it is still possible to find dangerous content on the Play Store or third-party app stores if you’re not careful.

You should avoid this type of content as much as possible when searching the play store. For most users, we really only have one important recommendation: PPSSPPP, the gold standard in PSP emulation.

PPSSPP is available in two different flavors: Original and Gold. The normal, original version of PPSSPP is a free download that allows you to play your PSP games in full graphics settings, without limits, and without ads.

Meanwhile, the Gold edition of PPSSPP gives you a new icon and helps to support the PPSSPP developer to continue working on the application.

As far as we know (and this seems to be supported by the developer), there is no difference between the standard and gold editions of the app, so if you don’t have the money to use the paid version of PPSSPP, you can keep using the emulator as best.

As with all emulators, PPSSPP does not and will never include games for use with your device. If you want to grab a game for your phone or tablet to use in PPSSPP, buy the UMD (Universal Media Disk) of the game you want to emulate, and dump the game files onto your PC to convert them into emulator-readable .iso files. We’ll talk more about copyright and the legal ramifications of emulation and piracy at the bottom of this article.

Alternatively, you can download the best PSP Games for Android which are already converted to the required .iso format.

If PPSSPP isn’t your thing, there aren’t many other apps to use on Android for the Playstation Portable.

We’ll discuss a couple of other options at the end of this list, but considering PPSSPP’s free features, we recommend that you use this trusted emulator before choosing an unpopular emulator from the Play Store.

How to Know the Real PSP Gold Emulator

Also be sure to avoid emulators on the Play Store that have very little rating while maintaining a high score, applications that try to appear as PPSSPP but not really what it portrays, and emulators that feature poor or broken English in the description.

For example, PSSP Gold has a name and logo almost identical to that of the PPSSPP Gold app, but the photo descriptions show a Nintendo Switch, and the app reviews are recent and do not describe the app in a meaningful way. “PSP Emulator pro [sic] 2018” includes a red PSP in its icon, a sparse description, and only three reviews with an average score of 3.3.

Another example, Pro PSP Emulator 2018, uses screenshots from PPSSPP in the description to advertise the game. You don’t need to stay away from almost all non-PPSSPPP Play Store emulators.

How to set up PPSSPP on your phone

We will use the Gold version of PPSSPP for this review. At just $4.49, it’s a steal for the support and features that the paid version of the app offers, and it’s by far our recommended choice for emulating the PSP.

If you’re concerned about how PPSSPSPP will run on your device, or whether or not you can play the downloaded version of your PSP UMD collection, trying the free version of PPSSPP Emulator is a great idea before making the jump to the paid version.

As always, we support developers who get paid for their hard work, especially in apps that are available for free with no in-app purchases or ads, but you choose the version that you can support with your wallet.

Settings to Change

When you dive into the PPSSPP for the first time, you will first need to allow the application to access your device’s storage by selecting the prompt on the screen. PPSSPP cannot work without this permission; The application will not be able to load or read a game on your device without you first granting the application permission to read data from your internal storage or SD card.

If your device has a microSD card slot, it is suggested that you use a microSD card to keep your games stored on the device, keep in mind the level of storage they can fully occupy.

Most games are a full gigabyte in size, so your phone or tablet can fill up with games pretty quickly.

The best part of PPSSPP is the number of settings it has in its menus to be customized and changed however you want. We’ll talk about how to increase the graphics or performance of your device below, but for now, let’s take a look at how you can customize your device using your Android phone or tablet settings.

As with any emulator, the first thing you’ll want to change is your control options, which you can improve using virtual on-screen controls. 

Dive into the settings menu (accessible from the main screen) and tap on the Controls option on the left side of the screen. Here you will find a lot of options, both for the controls and for the touch controls.

You can map your controls to a physical controller using a Bluetooth-enabled controller, which we’ll cover in more detail below. For now, let’s focus on changing the virtual keys on the screen.

Select “Edit Touch Control Layout” under “On-Screen Touch Controls” in the setup menu to open the customization menu. Here you can change all the options related to the appearance of your device when playing games.

By default, the app is set to move the buttons as you move your fingers across the screen, and you can move them anywhere you feel comfortable on your device. The Resize option allows you to resize each control unit, and the Visibility option allows you to enable or disable all controller options, including specific hotkeys that you can link to commands.

You can also reset the controls to the default layout and settings. Exiting this menu will also allow you to edit the opacity of your buttons (accessible by editing “Button opacity”, set by default at 65 percent) and you can configure an option to automatically hide your buttons (set by default at 20 seconds).

Lastly, you can completely disable the on-screen buttons if you are using a controller and want to view the video in full screen.

Other important settings: Audio options allow you to control the overall volume, and your audio latency options, and even allow a Bluetooth-compliant buffer to slow down the audio to decrease the lag that can occur when playing audio over Bluetooth.

The Networks menu may allow you to participate in online games over a local wireless network (LAN), although we have not tested this for the review.

Tools allow you to export your saved data, a great advantage when trying to move your data from your phone or tablet to your computer or new device. Finally, the system options allow you to change the user interface language, control screen rotation, change your background user interface, and even control your device’s PSP model number.

Games

To play your PSP games legally on your smartphone or tablet using emulation, you will have to download the files from your UMD collection to gain access to the .iso file on disk. Distributing or downloading .iso files from the Internet is illegal and is considered piracy, and for that reason (among others) we do not tolerate the spread of pirated materials.

Instead, you’ll need to have access to a PSP (or a friend’s PSP), and you’ll need to install custom firmware on your device to essentially hack your PSP.

PPSSPP doesn’t give a link to those instructions, and neither do we, but you can use Google to find out how to install this custom firmware on your device. Once you have finished installing the new firmware on your PSP, you can move on with extracting the game data from your disc.

With the custom firmware installed on your device, insert the UMD of your choice into your PSP. If you’re looking for game suggestions to buy through eBay or Amazon, we’ve got a few further down in this guide.

Connect your PSP to your PC using the USB cable that connects to your portable gaming device, and press Select on your PSP.

Thanks to the custom firmware installed on your device, you can choose to sync your PSP as a UMD device with a USB device and then allow the USB connection to take place between your PSP and your PC.

This will open File Explorer (Windows) or Finder (macOS) on your computer, with the open folder containing a virtual ISO file.

To copy the game to your PC, drag and drop the .iso file off your disk and onto your computer’s hard drive. Once the file transfer is complete, you can eject your PSP from your computer and connect your smartphone or tablet to your PC.

Transfer the .iso file to your device storage and you are ready to play. You can find the listed games directly on your storage using the emulator’s built-in file browser, and you can launch recent games from the recent games menu. PPSSPP will automatically create an icon with art for your game downloaded from the Internet; this can be changed in your settings.

You can find the listed games directly on your storage using the emulator’s built-in file browser, and you can launch recent games from the recent games menu. PPSSPP will automatically create an icon with art for your game downloaded from the Internet; this can be changed in your settings.

You can find the listed games directly on your storage using the emulator’s built-in file browser, and you can launch recent games from the recent games menu. PPSSPP will automatically create an icon with art for your game downloaded from the Internet; this can be changed in your settings.

Save and Load Game Files

When playing with PPSSPP, you have two different options to save and load your gameplay back into the game during breaks. Thanks to the power of emulation, you can use save states to save your location in a video game no matter where you are. Here is the difference between the two save options:

• Standard saves use the save options included in the game you are playing. This means that you save and load games exactly as you expect when playing through the standard experience. For example, some games use save points to save your games, while other games allow you to save and exit the menu to stop playing. Basically, the use of standard saves means that you will be playing the game exactly how the developer wanted you to, and there is nothing wrong with that.
• Saving states is an emulator-only option that allows you to take a “freeze frame” of where you are in the game that you can return to at any time. For example, he could create a safe state just before a big boss, only to die early in the fight. You could recreate the long journey through the game back to the boss, or you could use your save state to go back to the beginning of the fight. Some players see safe states as a gimmick, a way to get through the game without “really trying,” but of course, whether you want to live up to that expectation is up to you.

If you are wondering what you should use between the two platforms, the truth is that we suggest both. Save states are certainly faster than typical saves and loads, but they can also be a bit unstable from time to time.

Also, it’s a lot easier to write about a save state than an in-game save, so having a balance of the two is a great suggestion. If something goes wrong with your game file and your data becomes corrupted, you can use save states to restore your game to where it was within the emulator.

Using a combination of traditional and secure states, secure standards are absolutely the best choice, and a great balance between security, ease of use, and challenge. Since you control the number of saved states you perform, you can set the difficulty wherever you are. To access the save status menu screen, tap the icon on the back of your tablet or smartphone. This will load the menu for save states and the loading of previously viewed save states.

How to Get the Most Out of PPSSPP

Just because you can load a game into your emulator doesn’t mean you’re done learning how to use it.

As with any other program, you’ll want to make sure you’re getting the most out of your new gaming app, especially if you’re looking to go on the road with PPSSPP.

If you want to know how to increase the appearance of your games, the performance of your emulator, what games to play on the PSP, or what controllers you want to use, you have come to the right place.

Improved Graphics, Resolution, and Performance

As with most emulators, PPSSPP allows you to harness the power of your latest device to make the graphics on your device look better than they might otherwise. Increasing the scale and adjusting the graphics and resolution of your device is nothing new for emulators, but you will also want to remember that when playing PSP games on a mobile device, you may want to amplify and maximize your performance by modifying some of the settings in your menu. You can find a complete guide here, but here is the basic setup to get the most out of your emulator:

• Plays only in 1x or 2x resolution: You can increase your resolution to up to 5 times the original resolution of the PSP, but if you are trying to get the best performance from your device, leave it at 1x or 2x normal resolution. By default, PPSSPP is set to 2x the resolution. You can also change the screen resolution on your device, which is a hardware slider, but the rendering slider is the main utility you should focus on.
• Keep Scaling Up: Zooming improves the appearance of graphics in your games by increasing the number of polygons, but it also makes it more difficult to run your games at full resolution. Keep this setting off for best performance (it’s off by default) or increase it to higher numbers for better graphics and a bigger look for your games, assuming your device can handle it.
• Put the frame in the jump position and set it to an odd number (1, 3, and 5 is best): Skipping frames can give you a huge performance boost on mobile devices by making it easier for your device to deliver performance cleansed.
• Lastly, make sure to enable fast memory in the system settings if it is not already enabled. Although it says “unstable”, you shouldn’t have too much trouble using the device. Oh, and you should also enable multithreaded; Despite being experimental, it will help you speed up your overall performance to ensure that the application is using all of your processor cores. If you experience a crash in a specific game, simply disable it.

You can find many more detailed tips in the link above, although the four tips above are the most important in increasing your performance and making sure your graphics are set to run at peak performance on your device.

What Games Should I Play?

If you are new to the PSP, you might be looking for game suggestions to play on your mobile device. You can still buy new and used PSP games on both Amazon and eBay, making it easy to use software to download your games onto your computer and use the .iso file with your emulator.

If you are looking for free games, we have already posted a good number of PPSSPP games for Android that you can download for free.

However, if you are looking for the games that you should collect on the system to copy to your tablet or phone, here are some general ideas.

This is by no means a comprehensive list or review of these games, but the PSP library was large enough that it can be difficult to know where to start-especially since not every game works perfectly on the PSP.

We cannot guarantee that each of these games will load on your emulator (although you can search the PPSSPP forums to make sure they work), but for the most part, the PPSSPP emulation is pretty solid.

• Persona 3 Portable Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions: You can buy a port of this game on the Play Store, but if you already have the UMD lying around and want to play it on your device, it’s easy enough to grab and use PPSSPP to play games on the go. Final Fantasy Tactics has been praised for its storyline and tactical combat, and the release of War of the Lions adds some additional features in the form of animated cutscenes that look gorgeous, especially when expanded with PPSSPPP.
• Legend of Heroes Legend of Heroes: Trails of the Sky: We won’t lie, we haven’t played this yet. But we read Kotaku, one of the most popular gaming websites on the net, and JRPG expert Jason Schreier loves to talk about the game. It is not too resource-intensive of a game, so you shouldn’t run into any problem playing the game on your PSP emulator, but you should know that it is quite long. Wait to play this for up to a hundred hours before you can complete it.

There are other games, including Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, God of War: Chains of Olympus (and the other PSP game God of War, Ghosts of Sparta), and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, that we would recommend for PSP users; Unfortunately, those games typically have trouble running at a smooth and stable frame rate, even on modern devices, and you may be better off sticking to games that may run well on your phone.

Look for games with sprites instead of games with expansive environments and 3D models, and you will see that your experience improves enormously when you play.

Bluetooth Controllers

PPSSPP has the benefit of fully supporting Bluetooth controllers that are made for smartphones.

While you can play with the virtual buttons on the screen, most games would not argue that a physical controller just feels better, especially in games originally designed for the PSP.

The developer recommends MOGA controllers on their website, largely because MOGA controllers are some of the best Android-compatible game controllers on the market today, but there are several different controllers you can use to make your gaming experience more enjoyable. a

little more pleasant. Here’s a quick list of some of the controllers you can buy to make gaming on the go that much better:

• SteelSeries Stratus XL: This controller doesn’t have a phone clip to connect to your device, but its premium look makes it one of our favorite additions to this list, and a great controller to use while playing games on your emulator. SteelSeries is an established brand of PC gaming, and this controller will work with both your Android device and your Windows computer, making it ideal for all types of games, even outside of your PSP emulation. It’s pretty expensive with an MSRP of $ 59.99, but you can occasionally get it in the low $40s if you wait for a sale.
• Moto Mod Gamepad: At $79, it’s insanely expensive, and it will only work if you have a suitable Motorola phone that supports mods (read: the Moto Z and Z2 lineup), but if you can afford to put down the cash and have the right hardware for it. , the Gamepad will make your PSP experience the best it can be. There’s no Bluetooth sync, no cable issues, and you can still use your device’s camera thanks to the hole on the back of the gamepad. This device basically turns your Moto Z phone into a Switch-style device, and it’s pretty neat.

All of these selections will make your gaming experience feel a bit more premium and a bit more realistic. Of course, you don’t need a physical controller to play your PSP games, since the controls on the screen will work just fine, but for a lot of users, a physical controller is a must-have when it comes to playing games on the go.

VIDEO: How to Play PPSSPP Games on Android

The video below shows how to play PSP games on Android.

Other PSP Emulator Options

If, for whatever reason, you look at PPSSPP and can’t stand how it plays its games, you have a couple of other options to choose from. We told users in our previous guide that they should stay away from most PSP emulator apps on Google Play, thanks to the danger of using them, but that doesn’t mean that PPSSPP doesn’t have a single competitor on the Google Play store. . If you need or want an alternative to PPSSPP, you are tied with options, but there is an application that we can recommend to Android users that have managed to grow a following: AwePSP. AwePSP is a free emulator for Android.

Don’t FORGET: Get the Best PSP Games for Free

I hope you can now play PSP games on your Android without issues with the help of this guide.