PPSSPP Manager¶

Gets your PSP games ready to play from Steam with PPSSPP, the PSP emulator, and takes care of everything around it: it installs one tested release of PPSSPP for your own user, offers its settings, finds your games in its own Games\PSP folder and on PPSSPP's memory stick, puts them in Steam, and keeps a log. You play from Steam, and never need PPSSPP's own window: a game starts alone and full screen, and when you leave it you are back in Steam.

PPSSPP Manager is on the portal's Gaming tab: A on its tile installs it, and once it is installed, A opens it. It is also in the Start menu (Windows Portable Suite, PPSSPP Manager). It opens full screen; ⧉ (View) exits it.

What you need¶

Your PSP games, dumped from your own UMDs as disc images (ISO, CSO or CHD), or memory stick games (a folder with an EBOOT.PBP), put in the app's Games\PSP folder on the device or an SD card. PPSSPP needs no BIOS.
Steam, started once on the device, to play the games from Steam (optional: without Steam, X Play starts a game in PPSSPP itself).

The screen¶

Four cards on the left, PPSSPP, Your games, Settings and Log; the right side shows what the focused card does. The d-pad or the left stick moves the amber focus. Every action is a button, listed in the row at the bottom with what it does on the pane that shows: A included (A Install, A Steam mark, A View log). Press the button, or tap the entry. B goes back: from a list or a page to where you came from, from a pane to its card on the left (on a card it does nothing). Once you are in a pane, the d-pad stays in it: at the top or bottom of a list the focus stops, and only B takes you back to the cards. ⧉ (View) exits the app. ☰ (Menu) opens the information of the pane that shows, and closes it again; the information icon at a pane's top right does the same by touch.

The amber edge shows where you are, as in every app of the suite. Nothing is ever grayed out: when a button cannot do its job now, pressing it says why on the pane's status line. Every card, row and entry also works by touch, and a long list scrolls with the d-pad or a finger.

PPSSPP¶

The PPSSPP card on the left says only whether PPSSPP is installed and which button acts: Not installed. and Install with the A button. until it is installed, then Installed. and Remove with the X button.

The pane shows the PPSSPP that is installed, the one this version of the app installs, and the folder. PPSSPP's own window is never opened: your games are on the Your games card.

A Install (also A on the PPSSPP card) downloads PPSSPP 1.20.4 for Windows from PPSSPP's own release on GitHub (20 MB), checks it against the checksum this version of the app was tested with, and unpacks it. The page counts the megabytes while it downloads. Nothing is downloaded before you press A.
X Remove PPSSPP removes PPSSPP's program. Press it twice: the first press only changes the entry to Press again for five seconds. PPSSPP's memory stick, with your saves, save states and settings, stays in the folder, so a new install finds them again. It does not work while PPSSPP runs.
Y Update shows when an older PPSSPP is installed, and puts in the one this version of the app brings.

⧉ during the download asks first: a second ⧉ within five seconds exits the app and stops the download.

PPSSPP runs in portable mode: without an installed.txt beside PPSSPPWindows64.exe, it keeps its memory stick in the memstick folder beside it, with the PSP's own folders (PSP\SAVEDATA for the saves, PSP\PPSSPP_STATE for the save states, PSP\GAME for memory stick games, PSP\SYSTEM\ppsspp.ini for its settings), not in Documents.

A newer PPSSPP never reaches the device by itself: a new release of PPSSPP may change how games run, so it comes only with a new version of PPSSPP Manager, tried first, which the portal offers as an update. Then Y Update unpacks it over the older one, and what you made stays.

Where your games go¶

The app has a folder of its own, which it makes when it opens; you never choose or browse to a folder:

Games\PSP in your user folder (C:\Users\<you>\Games\PSP): put your disc images and memory stick games there, and they show on Your games. On an SD card or a USB drive, make a folder Games\PSP on it, and the app looks there too.

PPSSPP needs nothing from the console, so there is no folder for system files. The Log card shows where the folder is.

Games\PSP\
├── Daxter.iso            a disc image you put here (ISO, CSO or CHD)
└── Homebrew\             a memory stick game: its folder with EBOOT.PBP

Your games¶

The games are the PSP disc images (ISO, CSO and CHD) and the memory stick games (a folder with an EBOOT.PBP) in the Games\PSP folders and up to five folders below them, and the games on PPSSPP's memory stick. An ISO, a CSO and a PBP are read for the game's title and disc ID (ULUS10044); a CHD is listed under its file's name. A game's update on the memory stick is no game of its own: PPSSPP lays it over the game. A on the Your games card goes to the list.

You play the games from Steam; the app puts them there, and starts them there with X.

A Steam mark on a game marks it for Steam, or takes the mark away. Y Update Steam then makes Steam match the marks: each marked game is a non-Steam game named [PSP] <title> in Steam's library and its Big Picture mode; a game without the mark, or no longer found, is taken out. Steam closes for it and starts again, its window open and signed in. Steam must have been started once on the device. When there is nothing to change, Y says so on the status line instead. Right after writing, the app reads Steam's file back and counts the games in Steam from that; should a game it wrote not be found, the status line and the log say which.
X Play on a game that is in Steam starts it through Steam, as its tile in Steam's library would; Steam starts first when it is not open. A game that is not in Steam yet says so: mark it with A, then Y Update Steam. On a device without Steam (not installed, or never started), X Play starts the game in PPSSPP itself, full screen, the same way Steam would.
LT Refresh reads the game folders again: a game put there, renamed or taken away while the app is open shows at once. A game in Steam that you rename or move keeps its mark when the app can tell it is the same game (by its title ID or serial, or a disc image by its size): Y Update Steam then puts it in Steam under its new name and takes the old shortcut out. Until then, its shortcut in Steam shows a screen that says the game is no longer there, instead of starting the emulator; A closes it.
Steam's library opens from the portal: RT Steam in its bottom row.
RB Remove game on a game shows a page of what would go, and you decide what to keep. Its rows are the game, a disc image's file or a memory stick game's own folder (on PPSSPP's memory stick too), with its size, and its shortcut in Steam when it is there. Every row starts as Delete:
- A turns the row the focus is on to Keep, and back to Delete.
- X Delete marked deletes the rows still marked Delete and keeps the others. A shortcut marked Delete is taken out of Steam first (Steam closes for it and starts again). The status line on Your games then says what was deleted and what was kept.
- B goes back to Your games and deletes nothing.
- Your saves and save states stay on PPSSPP's memory stick; they are never on the page. The app offers no game whose folder is one of the app's Games\PSP folders itself, a drive, or a folder holding another game: the status line says to delete it by hand. Not while PPSSPP is open.

In a game started from Steam, PPSSPP takes the device's controller as it is: A is Cross, B Circle, X Square, Y Triangle, View Select, Menu Start, LB and RB the PSP's L and R, RT fast forward.

To quit a game, hold View, LB and RB together for two seconds: PPSSPP closes as its window would close, and you are back in Steam, or in the app when it started the game. Closing the game at the top of the screen says the hold was seen. It works the same in every game manager of the suite, started from Steam's library or from the app. The line at the bottom of Your games says so when a game starts. LT (or the guide button) still opens PPSSPP's pause menu; its Exit ends the game and closes PPSSPP too.

When the device runs hot, you are warned without the game stopping. While a game runs, the app reads the chip's temperature every two seconds. When the CPU or the GPU stays above 90 °C for half a minute, a banner shows at the top of the screen for a few seconds (on every screen, with a second one attached), and the controller rumbles three times; it warns again at most every five minutes while the chip stays that hot. The banner takes no press and does not take the focus from the game. A pause, or a lower performance mode (the portal's Performance Mode page), lets the device cool down. When the game ends, the log (A View log on the Log pane) says how hot the chip got and for how long. Windows cannot read how hot the outside of the device is: the chip's temperature is the closest reading, and the chip slows itself down at its own limit.

The pictures in Steam come from inside the game: its icon on the cover, the wide picture and as the logo, its background on the banner; a CHD gets its title on a dark background. With a SteamGridDB API key, Update Steam also takes a cover for each game from SteamGridDB: LB Steam artwork opens the page that keeps the key (X Paste, R3 ⌨, A Save, Y Remove key twice, B back without saving). See Steam artwork from SteamGridDB.

Settings¶

Right after the install, and each time before PPSSPP opens, the app turns off PPSSPP's notice of a newer release in its settings (memstick\PSP\SYSTEM\ppsspp.ini in its folder): a newer PPSSPP comes with the app. Everything else in the file stays as PPSSPP wrote it.

The Settings card's pane has four tabs, Screen, Game, Controller and On screen: LB and RB step through them, or tap one. A tab is a row per setting with its value; A on one steps to the next value and saves it at once (the row at the bottom says A Change, LB Previous tab, RB Next tab). PPSSPP reads it the next time it opens; while PPSSPP is open, the pane asks you to close it first, since PPSSPP writes its own settings back when it closes. The information icon at the pane's top right says what each setting of the tab does.

Screen

Setting	Values
Renderer	Vulkan (PPSSPP's choice on Windows), Direct3D 11, OpenGL: another one when a game shows faults
Resolution	Automatic (the screen's), 1x (480 × 272, the PSP's), 2x, 3x (1080p, the device's screen), 4x, 5x, 6x (a 4K TV), 8x; higher asks more of the graphics chip and the battery
Stretch to the screen	On or Off: the picture fills the whole screen; off, it keeps the PSP's shape
Integer scaling	On or Off: the picture a whole multiple of the PSP's, sharp pixels with black edges
Texture filtering	Automatic, Nearest (sharp pixels), Linear (smooth), Automatic, best quality
Anisotropic filtering	Off, 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x: sharper textures seen at an angle
VSync	On or Off: no tearing, a little more delay

Game

Setting	Values
Frame skipping	Off, 1, 2 or 3 frames: frames left out to keep a slow game at full speed
Cheats	On or Off: the cheats in PPSSPP's cheats folder, for the games they are made for
Volume	100%, 75%, 50%, 25%, Muted: PPSSPP's own volume, before Windows'

Controller

Setting	Values
Stick dead zone	PPSSPP's (0.15), Off, Medium (0.25), Large (0.35): how far a stick moves before the game sees it, for a stick that drifts
Stick sensitivity	PPSSPP's (1.10), As the stick (1.00), Higher (1.30): how far the PSP's stick goes for the stick's travel

On screen

Setting	Values
Show FPS	On or Off: the frames a second in a corner
Show speed	On or Off: the game's speed in percent
Show battery	On or Off: the device's battery in percent

The values show once PPSSPP is installed; until PPSSPP has written its settings, they are its own defaults. A value in PPSSPP's settings that the app does not offer is shown as it is, and A goes on from the first value.

Log¶

PPSSPP's memory stick, with how many saves and save states are on it, where your Games\PSP folder is, and the newest lines of this app's log (the Steam changes, the installs, the settings changed). A View log, or a tap on the pane, shows the whole log in the pane: the d-pad scrolls it, and B goes back.

How it works¶

A game's shortcut in Steam starts the app itself in its play mode, PPSSPP-Manager.exe --play --fullscreen --pause-menu-exit "<game>", which shows no window: it starts PPSSPPWindows64.exe --fullscreen --pause-menu-exit "<game>" in PPSSPP's folder, watches the controller for View, LB and RB held, and ends when PPSSPP ends, so Steam sees the game end. With a game named, PPSSPP goes straight to it without its own window, --fullscreen gives the game the whole screen, and --pause-menu-exit makes the pause menu's Exit close PPSSPP. Asked to close, PPSSPP gets ten seconds before it is ended. On a device without Steam the app starts a game the same way. A shortcut made by an earlier version, which starts PPSSPPWindows64.exe itself, shows (Update Steam) on its game: Y Update Steam writes it again.

Every Monday the suite checks whether PPSSPP has a newer release than the one this app brings, and whether the file it downloads is still the one it was tested with; what moved goes to the suite's developers, and a newer PPSSPP comes in a new version of the app.

Install it on its own¶

The portal installs it. To install it on its own, download wp-ppsspp-v<x.y.z>.zip and SHA256SUMS from its release, then in PowerShell, in that folder:

(Get-FileHash wp-ppsspp-v<x.y.z>.zip).Hash -eq (-split (Get-Content SHA256SUMS))[0]   # True: the download is intact
Expand-Archive wp-ppsspp-v<x.y.z>.zip . -Force
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File wp-ppsspp-v<x.y.z>\install.ps1

Installed on its own, it gets a Start-menu entry and a Desktop shortcut. Afterwards the installer asks whether to remove the download.

Option
`--no-desktop-shortcut`	the Start-menu entry only
`--uninstall`	remove the app; the settings, the log and PPSSPP with its memory stick stay
`--uninstall --purge`	also remove the settings, the log and PPSSPP's folder, with the saves and the save states on its memory stick

Files¶

Where	What
`%LOCALAPPDATA%\windows-portable-suite\windows-portable-ppsspp\app\`	The program, `PPSSPP-Manager.exe`
`%LOCALAPPDATA%\windows-portable-suite\windows-portable-ppsspp\emulator\`	PPSSPP (`PPSSPPWindows64.exe`), its memory stick (`memstick\`: settings, saves, save states, memory stick games), and `installed.json` (the version and the files the app installed)
`%LOCALAPPDATA%\windows-portable-suite\windows-portable-ppsspp\covers\`	The covers from SteamGridDB, per game
`%LOCALAPPDATA%\windows-portable-suite\windows-portable-ppsspp\windows-portable-ppsspp.log`	The log
`%APPDATA%\windows-portable-suite\windows-portable-ppsspp.ini`	The app's settings
`%APPDATA%\windows-portable-suite\steamgriddb-key`	Your SteamGridDB API key, when you put one there
Steam's `userdata\<user>\config\shortcuts.vdf` and `grid\`	The games in Steam and their pictures