PSP Rollout and Launch
By
televandalist.
The PSP Rollout and Launch
A little over a year ago, Jamiras and gde worked on updates to RALibretro that enabled hardware rendering. The most known perk to this was that N64 would run in RALib instead of N64 development being exclusive to the standalone. I’m not going to pretend to know the more techy aspects of it and anything else I say about that would end up being corrected by Jamiras anyway. However, one “hidden” perk to that update was that the PPSSPP core actually ran in RALib and memory was exposed.
This is shortly after I found out I was my own worst enemy here because I proceeded to not shut up about it… and still haven’t.
As exciting as that was, there was a laundry list of issues that needed to be worked out before it was viable for achievement development and players. I have no background in programming, so I was also at the mercy of waiting on updates. All I could do was test, test, and test some more.
Then back in May, I started DMing devs to gauge interest in PSP sets. I wanted to see how much “claim overlap” there would be and figured it would be better to get those resolved ASAP. StingX2 volunteered to help contact devs so I could focus on organizing the data and continue testing games. Sometime in August, Jamiras had the hashing for PSP worked out. That’s when we started contacting devs again to lock-in their claims and to plan a rollout schedule. The overall plan was to try and make PSP support feel like an actual console launch instead of an “Oh, by the way…” news update. Remember the Sega Saturn launch?
We continued to hype it up and revealed more details each week. StingX2 helped coordinate and manage the rollout until the final week, in which I had to fly solo. That’s another matter entirely and still pending resolution. Point is, I am making sure StingX2 gets credit where credit is due.
Anyway, the most work put into the rollout was done by our achievement developers, which we locked in a dark room and didn’t let them out for an entire month. All in all, I think it was a success and the launch went better than we could have anticipated. At the time of writing this, I’m also making a survey for devs to see how they felt about it. So, thanks again to all who contributed.
Launch day for PSP consisted of 38 sets being promoted to core. 36 base sets, a bonus set, and a subset. The previous record was held by PS1, which had 23 sets at launch and 35 by the end of the first month. You guys crushed it. 
![Legend of Heroes, The: Trails in the Sky FC [Subset - NG Nightmare]](https://retroachievements.org/Images/048312.png)
![Monster Hunter Freedom Unite [Bonus]](https://retroachievements.org/Images/047960.png)
Hopefully one of these days, I’ll be able to play some of them. In the meantime, have fun!