Necroing this thread because I've been sick for the past week and bored out of my mind when I felt too shitty to sit at my computer. I discovered that
PPSSPPhas made massive improvements in the past year. I had given up on ever emulating the PSP well, since the Java emulator was a giant turd and PPSSPP didn't seem like it was going anywhere.
Currently, you can emulate most games well enough to play through them fully. Especially the popular ones, since people go out of their way to make fixes for them. It's not just PC either, I am currently about halfway through Persona 3 Portable on my phone and it runs the game at 100% speed and almost flawlessly even though I am rendering it at my phone's native 1080p resolution, with texture filtering and postprocessing on, etc. It looks better than it ever did on a real PSP, that's for certain. (My phone is a HTC Droid DNA, so YMMV performance-wise.) Tactics Ogre is the only other game I've tried on the phone so far, and it appears to run fine too. The two games prefer different versions of the emulator though, P3P likes the stable release version on Google Play, while Tactics Ogre: LUCT has nasty audio glitches on anything but the bleeding edge devbuild that you have to sideload.
On my PC, I've gotten a bunch more running without any trouble so far--Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, Persona 2 Innocent Sin, Valkyria Chronicles 2, Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth, Jeanne d'Arc, 3rd Birthday, etc. I only use the
devbuildthere, as every game seems to run better with it. Jeanne d'Arc is the only one with potential issues, since the renderer for that game requires a feature that is only found in OpenGL 3.x and that rules out a lot of PC GPUs and nearly every phone/tablet on the market. Sucks, since that's another game I think I could actually play on the phone using touch screen controls, as opposed to needing the gamepad on my PC to control effectively. Turn-based JRPGs and SRPGs are about the only things that fit the bill there.
Anyway, people interested in PSP games but not enough to actually buy a silly handheld should give it a shot. It's vastly better than I thought it would be, and it will definitely hold me over until Sony pulls their head out of their ass and releases the VitaTV in North America.