Again, thanks a lot Margot for the awesome community threads!
I’m pretty new myself to emulation on Android so I was pretty intrigued when I got introduced to PPSSPP, a FOSS PSP emulator that’s available for Android. I didn’t pay attention in the beginning and Obtainium was pulling an 8 years old version (as the author isn’t hosting Android builds on his GitHub anymore, they’re hosted elsewhere), but surprisingly it worked amazingly well on my Pixel 7a with Android 14 despite being based on the old OpenGL backend (while the new versions come by default with the Vulkan backend enabled). Installing it from the Play Store gets you the latest version.
What I like the most is how easy it is to combine different shaders and have a live preview of the result:
Right now I’m still (re)playing around with Crisis Core: FF VII and haven’t found a good combination of shaders and haven’t gotten much luck with upscaling shaders yet, but the CRT lines shader looks cool so far. Maybe someone more experienced with PPSSPP has some suggestions?
Also, I ended up buying the Gamesir X2 USB-C controller and it works perfectly with PPSSPP, those ugly on-screen controls are no more and the phone feels now like a real handheld console.