Jailbreaking emulation legend ZodTTD has started the ball rolling on Pre gaming by installing his PlayStation emulator, psx4all, on the smartphone—and while there are kinks to be worked out, he says it runs even faster than on iPhone.

There’s no denying the Pre has several huge advantages over the iPhone family when it comes to gaming, especially the hardware keyboard, and it looks like it won’t be lacking in the graphical department, either. The emulation is still in the early stages; there’s no sound and he hasn’t figured out the screen scaling yet, but this little demo of Wipeout XL looks incredibly smooth.

ZodTTD says a fuller, more polished version of psx4all for the Pre should be coming soon, and with any luck, this’ll be the first hurdle on the way to a substantial gaming community for the Pre. [ZodTTD via Engadget]

The video above shows (turn the sound off if you’re at work) shows developers “Davee” and “Bubbletune” using a TIFF exploit on 5.03 firmware, placing the PSP into the correct state that it can eventually run custom homebrew apps. It’s not quite finished, but it should be close now. [Slashdot via Technabob]

Update: Nevermind! Looks like Chickhen, the homebrew enabler, is available now. Thanks karltpb.

The thing has a 4.3-inch screen, almost the same amount of face and shoulder buttons as the PSP, but it only supports “NES, Famicom, Gameboy, Gameboy Colour, Super Famicom, SEGA MegaDrive and some sort of 32-bit ROM.” No actual PSP playing here—but that’s not the point, is it?

Then again, if you already HAVE a PSP, you can always just hack it and play emulation games that way. [Chinagrabber via Technabob via Slashgear]

Cool demonstration of the tech in action, but damn woman, get back on the road! Brief clip, with the fun beginning at 30 seconds and ending pretty much instantaneously. Update.

Now, the driving may be terrible, but the video itself answers a question about the emulator regarding sound support. Short answer: It looks like it has it!

Update: As is painfully obvious in the demo (and noted below by beloved Gizmodo commenters), there’s something wonky going with the touchscreen, which looks to be anything but sensitive. Bad form.

However, as our tipster Travis points out, this “wonkiness” is most likely due to the nature of the emulated OS:

First off I’d like to point out that this is an emulation of the classic PalmOS running on top of the new WebOS. The classic palms uses a resistive touchscreen and as such would require a stylus with a much smaller point of accuracy. Now you’re trying to replicate that on a capacitive touch screen. The emulator doesn’t know that though and its still looking for that stylus tip.

You can actually see on the video one of the ways that Palm tried to work around this discrepancy. When she touches the screen there is an after effect of where she touched. If you watch again you’ll see that she’s just not touching in the right place. Instead of noticing where the emulator is registering her touch and re-adjusting appropriately she’s just poking in the same spot over and over. The ‘wonky’ thing that’s going on with the touchscreen is that you’ve got a capacitive touchscreen designed around finger based input trying to replicate the input in a way that the PalmOS software looking for a ‘push’ on a resistive touch screen from a stylus will recognise.

Good form. [MotionApps via Engadget]

The MacOS iPhone project has finally managed to “port” the OS to the phone, albeit a version that first came out in 1991. I say “port” because the OS is running through QEMU emulation software, and can be launched directly from the iPhone’s springboard. Basically, it’s a System 7 app, which is pretty cool.

There’s no text input system yet, but the OS recognises touch just fine. You can play with MacPaint, so hurray, I guess. As silly as this all may seem, it at least has a little more conceptual continuity that the Windows 3.1 on an N95 project, which also depended on QEMU, the technology that is really the star of both stories: QEMU running on the iPhone opens the door to all kinds of emulation, not just fun nostalgia projects. If fun nostalgia projects are your thing, there are plenty of photos of System 7 in action at the project page. [OSNews via Electronic Pulp via BBGadgets]

It wasn’t a Macintosh, but an Apple II with a monochrome screen and PC emulator hardware installed. The board was called the 88 Card, “the only fully functional 8088 processor for the Apple II personal computer” and it had the stunning list price of $US899. But don’t fret, because this also included 64K of additional RAM and CP/M 86–if you wanted DOS and Windows you had to buy them separately.

As seen in the video, controlling Mario is fairly natural, though quick turns and exact jumps are difficult to execute (playing Mario with the stock controls is often worse, though). Bomberman sort of works, but in that case – and many others – the old touch control overlay is much easier. Obviously none of these games were designed with tilt control in mind, but a surprising number are at least playable. Add this to the pile of reasons we still want an active app black market. NES.app 2.3.0 with tilt control is available now in Cydia. [NES.app]

From the look of the finished result pic below, I was reminded of Club Nintendo SNES Classic Controller (Japan only), and became insanely jealous all over again. [Ed's Howto]