antoxa2584x/shar-psp

This project is an experimental attempt to run The Simpsons: Hit and Run, a 2003 PlayStation 2 game, on the PlayStation Portable handheld console. It takes an existing modernized version of the game's engine and rewrites the graphics layer so it works on the PSP's hardware. The PSP has only about 22 megabytes of usable memory to share between everything the game needs, which is a serious constraint compared to the original PC and console releases. To make the original game's art fit, the project includes a separate offline tool, written in Python, that shrinks textures by converting them from full color images down to a smaller 8 bit palette format, drops unused detail levels, and can simplify 3D models by reducing their number of triangles. According to the README, this brings the memory used by the game's frontend menu textures down from about 24 megabytes to about 7 megabytes, with barely any visible quality loss when only the texture step is used. As it stands, the animated 3D main menu, including its background scene and UI elements, already runs on real PSP hardware and in the PPSSPP emulator. The underlying systems for loading the game's files, models, textures, and animations are working. Actual gameplay, controller input, and sound are not implemented yet and are listed as planned future work. Building the project requires a specialized development kit for the PSP called pspdev, plus the standard build tools that come with it. The output is a bootable file that gets copied onto a PSP memory stick alongside the optimized game assets. The README is explicit that this is a preservation and enhancement project only. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the original game's publishers, claims no ownership of the original characters or assets, is not monetized in any way, and does not permit commercial redistribution of the project or its builds.