At the time you needed a fairly capable gaming PC for PS2 emulation, which is a far cry from the igpu in an atom. Given a PSP is basically a cut down PS2, I don’t think emulation on that calibre hardware is an achievable goal. An atom doesn’t even have a hardware programmable vertex shaders, on windows I don’t even think they had GL 2.1.
I never thought I’d see the day where an atom would be vintage tech, and people would still be rocking said vintage tech. It’s amazing you’ve kept it running and usable. Modern PCs can’t even keep up with modern OS, and you’re still rocking the good old days of single core single thread. Rock on!
I've got GL 2.1 running under n270 perfectly well, up to the point to test Yandex Maps to roam around Prypiat.
Even for emulation PPSSPP was far less demanding than PCSX2.
Now, OpenGL ES 2.0 isn't OpenGL 2.0, this is the trap of those that think OpenGL is the same everywhere.
Also OpenGL 3.3 is from 2010, whereas OpenGL 2.1 was designed for 2006 hardware, how back you want to get?
Because not every hardware capable of running PS2 level games supports the newer APIs.
> Also OpenGL 3.3 is from 2010, whereas OpenGL 2.1 was designed for 2006 hardware, how back you want to get?
Doesn't matter how old it is, what matters is if it has the required features or not. For the use case being discussed, GL 2.1 is sufficient so there's no good reason to not target it. That's my philosophy at least. When I write code, I always use the oldest library or API that has the stuff I need. I don't just go automatically for the latest one.
Newer APIs are also more flexible, making fewer assumptions about how things in the pipeline should run. E.g. the way a buffer clamps or overflows compared to the PS2 may be hardcoded in OpenGL 2.1 meaning you have to write emulation of that feature inside the older API to then run the code to emulate the buffer. In OpenGL the shaders types are limited in this manner, in WebGPU you can just use arbitrary compute shaders instead of having any assumptions at all about the rendering pipeline.
There are tradeoffs to selecting the older APIs just as there are tradeoffs selecting the newer APIs. Generally, the latter is easier on the implementation side for emulators.
That doesn't necessarily stop you from pointing an LLM at it and getting a working WebGL 1 version of course, it's just not a universal answer to "how should someone spend their tokens.