How to play PSP games (PlayStation Portable) on your Android smartphone or tablet?

If you love playing games on your PlayStation Portable, you’re probably not gonna need it anymore because now you can also play PSP games right away on your smartphone or tablet. But most of people out there don’t know exactly how to play PSP games on their mobile devices.

It’s actually not really difficult to play PSP games on Android device. All you need to do is download the PSP emulator (app) on Google Play Store, download the PSP games on Google and you’re good to go.

Okay then, below I’m going to show you how to download and play PSP games on your Android device. Hope you like it!


First things first, now open the Google Play Store app on your device.


After landing on Google Play Store home page, now search an app called “PPSPP” and then download it to your device. It’s actually not really huge in terms of size, but I suggest you to use your Wifi connection when downloading this app, you know, to save your mobile internet data.


Okay, after the installation process is complete, now open the app.


If you’re having a problem to find PSP games on internet, you can actually search them on Google using the key phrase: “name of the game PSP ROM”. For example, if you want to look for Prince of Persia Rival Swords game on PSP, you can simply type this on Google:

Prince of Persia Rival Swords PSP ROM.

In the search results, you will see a bunch of websites that have the ROM of this game. Now download it on your computer.


After downloading the PSP game/ROM from the net, all you have to do now is transfer the game file (with .iso extension) from your computer to your smartphone or tablet.

You can actually make a new folder in root directory of your device and call it “PSP games” for example. Later on PPSPP app, you can just locate this folder and tap on each game so they will appear on the homescreen of the app.

I strongly recommend you to put the PSP game/ROM files in INTERNAL STORAGE so the game can run smoothly. Besides, by doing this, you will save battery life and prevent your device from overheating.


As you can see, on the menu screen, there are 3 tabs on the top left corner: Recent, Games and Homebrew and Demos.

The “Recent” tab will show you the recent games that just played earlier on this app. The “Games” tab will show you the file explorer where you can locate the PSP games on your device storage.

Meanwhile, the last tab "Homebrew & Demos" will notify you if there are some interesting demos or updates from the developer.

The first thing you need to do now is locate the PSP games or ROMs that you have downloaded earlier from the internet.

This process is really important because you want PPSPP to recognize the location of all your PSP games so later these games will appear on “Recent” tab on the homescreen.


Okay, the next thing to do now is configure the keymap/gaming controls of this app. This app actually already has the default setting for control layout which imitates the layout of gaming controllers on consoles.

However, this default control layout is actually not really convenient to use especially when playing games like Pro Evolution Soccer 2014. So this is why you need to configure the default gaming layout on PPSPP according to your liking.

Now on the homescreen, tap on the option “Setting”. After that, you will be taken to the setting screen where you’ll be able to configure the whole thing of this app, from the sound, controls and even graphics.

Okay, on the setting screen, now tap on “Controls” and then select “Edit touch control layout..”.

As you can see on the screen, there are some sub vertical tabs on the left like: Move, Resize, Visibility, Reset and Back.

To move each key on “Move” tab, you can simply drag any button and then place it according to your liking. And if you want to resize it, you can do it as well on the tab “Resize”.

Meanwhile, if you want to hide some buttons from appearing on the screen, you can switch to “Visibility” tab and then remove the check mark on any button that you don’t want to see on the screen.

I personally hide some buttons like: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and Unthrottle because they are not important in the game. So you probably should too.


Okay, now go back to the homescreen and to start any game.


After selecting the game, now press the “Back” capacitive button on your device to pause and enter the menu screen. As you can see, on the left area, there are 5 empty slots that PPSPP provides to you if you want to save the game.

The cool thing about this app is, you can save the game in any circumstance or position during the gameplay.

For example, if you’re playing Pro Evolution Soccer and the kick off is about to start, you can just press “Back” to PAUSE the game and then tap on any empty slot that says “Save State” to save that last exact checkpoint.

Later if you want to reload that last checkpoint of this game, you can simply press “Load State” again to reload the game in exact last position/checkpoint.

This definitely will help a lot when playing adventure or action games when you’re in the boss battle which usually is really hard to defeat.

So you can just press “Save State” and if you die, you can simply press “Load State” again to spawn in the last checkpoint of that boss battle. Isn’t that awesome, huh?


Well, there you have it guys, my guide for you if you want to play PSP games on your Android device. I personally still use this app for playing Pro Evolution Soccer 2014 game because this game has the same gameplay mechanics just like in console version.

And this is totally different with Android version of PES 2012 which is really easy to play and not challenging for me.

Anyway, what about you guys? Do you happen to also use PPSPP emulator on your device? What do you think about this app? What PSP games do you still play on your device?

Please don't hesitate to share your opinion on the comment section below.

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