The great Exophase popped into our forums recently to tell us that he had released version 0.9 of his GBA emulator, gpSP. This has been called by many appreciative people as the best GBA emulator for the PSP because of its great compatibility and consistent performance.

In his post, the dev said that he isn't "terribly impressed with the unofficial builds of gpSP that exist without my consent." You could read his complete and exact statements on the forum release thread or on the readme file that comes with the download. He mentioned that in spite of all the challenges brought about by some unappreciative people, he still plans on working on the gpSP for the benefit of the homebrew community.

He also mentioned that he intended to release the emulator by midnight, but they encountered some problems during beta testing, and of course he needed to fix them. Anyhow, this version is still in its beta phase. He says that version 1.0 won't be a beta...that is if he releases a version 1.0. Here's an excerpt of the lenghty changelog for version gpSP v0.9. Be sure to check out Exophase's insights on the forum thread; and the complete changelog on the readme file.

Changelog:

* Fixed stereo output being reversed.
* Fixed a bug causing misaligned errors on 8bit writes to the gbc audio channel 3 wave data (fixes various Super Robot Wars games)
* Fixed DMA with garbage in their upper 4 bits (fixes a crash in Zelda: Minish Cap)
* Added double buffering to the rendering, removes line artifacts.
o Big thanks to Brunni for the idea.
* Fixed a bug preventing some SRAM based games from saving (fixes MMBN4-6)
* Fixed a bug causing part of EWRAM to potentially get corrupted if code segments loaded in EWRAM cross 32KB boundaries (fixes Phantasy Star 2)
* Fixed a bug causing games using movs pc in user mode (very bad behavior) to crash. Fixes Colin McRae Rally 2.0.
* Improved timing a bit more. Fixes GTA Advance.
* Fixed a sprite clipping bug (fixes crash in third boss of Zelda: Minish cap)
* Increased translation buffer size significantly (fixes Donkey Kong: King of Swing)
* Fixed a dynarec bug causing add pc, reg to not work in Thumb code (fixes crash in DBZ:LoZ, seems to fix crashes in battle in Golden Sun, probably fixes other games)
* Made sprites using tiles < 512 not display in modes 3-5 (fixes a couple minor graphical bugs)
* Removed abort on instruction 0x00000000 hack, was breaking a certain bugged up game (Scurge)