My understanding is that the PSP uses PSone hardware. If that's the case you won't be emulating crap on that.
As I understand it, R Belmont was talking about performance on PlayStation hardware, and mentioned that with current technology, even PacMan needs frameskip to work properly. If that's the case, there's nt a chance in hell of anything else being playable.
PlayStation tech is very limited, and quite dedicated to simple tasks. Something as broad as MAME would be nigh impossible for it to do at all, let alone at decent speed.
If you want portable MAME, get a GP32 from import. That's your only hope.
[EDIT]
Correction: The Sony PlayStation and PSone where MIPS R3000 CPUs running at 33MHz.
The PSP is an R4000 running at 100MHz(
)
According to this:
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-macppc/2005/03/12/0000.htmlDuring something like a GCC compilation, the R4000 is 10 times SLOWER than a G3 PPC 350MHz CPU.
In other words: that old Pentium 166MMX you've got stashed in the cupboard will more than likely be a faster MAME box than a PSP, as far as general-purpose computing goes.