A few months ago, people discovered how to run their own, home cooked software on the PSP. Since then, and the discovery that Linux code could actually be ported quite easily, a veritable explosion of software hit the scene, among which some awesome software like Pixie, an eBook reader, and various emulators of older consoles, including a very snazzy SNES emulator. That makes for the very first portable SNES This very popular system saw literally thousands of games released for it, and the games look very good on the small PSP widescreen.
The only catch is that you have to have OS version 1.50 or less, 1.51 and 1.52 have fixes in them that prevent Home Brew from running, for some reason (it’s a shame that Sony doesn’t support this apparently, because the software is truly aweseome).
I was wondering if any other PSP owners here are discovering this vast new realm of possibility. I’ve figured out most stuff, and am tempted to start coding myself, so I’m also available for some questions. Also, we could discuss (hence my posting in the Café) some of the great games of that era.
Just a small correction. The GBA has some expensive cartridges that allow you to load your own games on them, and a SNES (and Genesis, too I believe) emulator has been done for it. Making THAT the first portable SNES (though I’m sure someone will be along shortly to tell us about the time they installed a SNES emulator on their cellphone).
It seems a tad limited - in the number of games that work, and it doesn’t have sound, and obviously it would be struggling a little for power, but kudos that it has been done and I guess it was the first.
There are some obvious advantages to this PSP version though, which runs just about all SNES games you can throw at it with full sound, correct aspect ratio and so on. Some run a tad slow, but others a tad fast, and you can use a frame skipping feature and sound and graphics accelleration functions to compensate, you can save 8 gamestates per game, you can select the PSP’s processor speed (goes up to 333mhz, but is on 222mhz standard), and of course the memory card (available in sizes up to 1Gb) can hold a lot of games.
All in all its very impressive for what is essentially still pretty early work (but obviously benefiting from easy portability).
I was thinking about picking up a PSP to play around with this. Does anyone know of a reliable way to get a v1.50 firmware PSP? Can you still find them in stores if you know what to look for, or is this an ebay item?
Some stores that don’t sell so many of them should still have them. In this thread they mention something about an ‘A’ in the serial number box for 1.50, and a ‘B’ for higher versions. They include a picture …
This very popular system saw literally thousands of games released for it, and the games look very good on the small PSP widescreen.