More remote disc streaming options

[childishbeat]

I'd like support for these features to come to PPSSPP as soon as possible:

• The left analog stick to be able to be used to navigate PPSSPP's own menus like you can using the directional pad of a game controller.
• The additional choices of Bluetooth and USB for remote disc streaming, both of which wouldn't require any network connections at all.
• Multiple remote disc streaming locations to be able to be saved (unlimited would be nice).

[TehPlayer14]

I think you can do that on NTFS file system + few programs

[hrydgard]

Left analog in menus I definitely want to get done in the near future, so I'm tagging it 1.7.0 for that purpose. As for the others, lower priority (but pull requests accepted, of course) and should probably be broken out into their own issues.

[unknownbrackets]

It'd help to understand the use case for the remote streaming changes. I guess travel with active network share devices? Not something I see often.

I think analog stick is related to remapping controls for the UI (with potentially some sort of "are you sure?" prompt), which might already be a separate issue...

-[Unknown]

[childishbeat]

Now I'm able to use real Universal Media Discs inserted into my PSP-1003's Universal Media Disc drive with PPSSPP (I've only tested this with PPSSPP 1.6.3 on my Amazon Fire TV (2nd Generation) so far), but only when my PSP-1003 is in USB Mode, and when that's set to mount a Universal Media Disc as a USB drive, which I can do via changing the XMB USB Device to UMD Disc in the Configuration Section of my PSP-1003's PRO Recovery Menu. I suggest it's made so a PlayStation Portable doesn't need to be in USB Mode for real Universal Media Discs to be able to work with PPSSPP.

[hrydgard]

I don't think analog stick in menus is necessarily related to the ability to remap input in menus. It should always be safe to map the first analog axes to navigation I think... Or I guess hypothetically in some case they might be stuck in a direction? But we can make sure to only simulate an arrow movement when there's a transition from zero to a direction.

@childishbeat how would that work in practice? The PSP will not expose the UMD unless it's in USB mode, right...

[unknownbrackets]

Fair point about analogs - I think we already only simulate input when they change, so maybe that's enough.

Someone was attempting to make a UMD attachment for Android (I have no information on how this interacts with patents or etc., but guessing that's been thought about):

https://forums.ppsspp.org/showthread.php?tid=23397

But yeah, as far as CFW, the only other option would be writing some sort of PSP app to act as a network server and handle remote network requests. However, this has some problems:

• The PSP hardware only supports wifi 802.11b. Remote disc streaming has overhead and performance might be pretty bad.
• The PSP Go also supported Bluetooth 2.0, but that's even slower than 802.11b.

The USB speed isn't great either, but it's probably got at least better latency and much better speed than the actual UMD drive. However, it's still possible that some of the read ahead that remote disc streaming currently does might "work against you" - I'm not sure. I've only tested on faster networks with low latency.

So your best options are probably: USB, or an HTTP server on the PSP.

-[Unknown]

[childishbeat]

I theorize Ad Hoc, Bluetooth, FTP and other wireless technologies could be used to wirelessly connect a PlayStation Portable to another device as a wireless Universal Media Disc drive, not just for PPSSPP, but also for any other program that supports USB drives in any way(s) for any purpose(s). Also, I've used my PlayStation Portable as a game controller for PPSSPP before, doing that on Windows (perhaps maybe my best guess), but I don't remember which version of PPSSPP I used on Windows then, but I do know I used a homebrew application for PlayStation Portable called FuSa GamePad on the PlayStation Portable side to do that. Thus, I've successfully used two kinds of what is effectively hybrid emulation, but not the same kind of hybrid emulation as the POLYMEGA™ video game console uses, with PPSSPP in total: run software from the PlayStation Portable, doing it via PlayStation Portable, and use the PlayStation Portable as a game controller.

[unknownbrackets]

Separating the analog stick part, which is already #10996.

Of course, using FuSa for tiny bits of controller data isn't very much the same as streaming megabytes of data. I'm not personally planning to do anything here anytime soon.

-[Unknown]