The PSP Remaster project, first announced in May and discussed in detail at a developer event in Tokyo last month, allows game makers to take PSP titles and emulate them on the PlayStation 3. They’re free to add HD-level graphics, surround-sound, 3D visual support, save-game transferring between the PS3 and PSP, and even completely new features not seen in the PSP original. The project is hot news in Japan right now, chiefly because its first launch title — due out August 25 over there — is an HD-compatible version of Monster Hunter Portable 3rd, the PSP killer app that’s sold nearly 4.5 million copies across Asia.
According to Teiji Yutaka, member of the Software Solutions division of Sony Computer Entertainment that headed the project, PSP Remaster got its start with the previous PSone Classics project and other PS3 emulation efforts. “We were developing this emulation platform,” he told Famitsu magazine in this week’s issue, “and through it we came to realize that we might be able to get the PSP running in realtime on the PS3 without much problem. It was our talented engineers that made it happen.”
The software, called the PSP Engine, is a sort of emulator/operating-system hybrid that runs on the PS3 hardware and provides support for all the PSP’s functionality, including ad-hoc network support. “We had things up and running on the PSP Engine around one and a half, two years ago,” Yutaka said. “The HD rendering was in operation by then, too, and that’s when we began to remold the project into a saleable product.”
