PSP Hacks: Tips & Tools for Your Mobile Gaming and Entertainment Handheld

The PlayStation Portable (PSP) is simply stunning when you see it in personit's like a little glimpse into a sci-fi future where incredibly powerful multimedia uber-devices are all ubiquitously connected and highly portable. When I received my bootleg export from Japan prior to the PSP shipping in the USA, I wanted to lick the screen. The same joy a lot of us had when we got our first PC is now a newfound excitement over having so much richness in such a small form factor.

But! That's the rubthe PSP in all its technological glory is crippled out of the box. The hardware can do more, there are gigabytes of applications the PSP can run, thousands of people making things for the PSP, but only if you know how to use them and how to route around the barriers that come along with every PSP.

Even for the casual gamer, it's not enough that the PSP can display photos, surf the web, and maybe watch a movie or twooh no, generations of nimble thumbs and eager downloaders have been trained that computing, in all forms, is about doing more, personalizing, and often using technologies in ways it was never intended to be used. It's not about copying games, it's about the expectations of what a computer, even one meant for gaming, could be bent and tweaked for.

We would never be able to use and learn an open source chess game for our PSPs or run Atari 2600 emulators if our only method was to wait for someone, such as Sony (or a third-party game publisher) to release these. Each week, I see more applications come from the homebrew community than all the PSP game publishers combined. These aren't UMD epics, of coursethey're PDF readers, emulators, and curiosities that keep me interested in my PSP investment.

Sony, throughout the years, has trained us that it's all about owning your ownfrom the AIBO, to the VCR, to the Walkman. When Sony introduced the VCR over two decades ago, it was met with a lot of resistance: "Recording TV, that's crazy! It's like stealing!" some said. But, Sony and others dragged an entire industry kicking and screaming to new business models, and now, recorded media makes up a significant part of television and movie revenue. Could Sony open up the PSP and let anyone make games and applications? Maybe, but for now that isn't even a rumor.

While hacking, modding, and tweaking is the only way to really get the most out the PSP, one day I suspect that Sony will see how wonderful the community is, how rabid they are about making things, and how they've really made the platform far more interesting. Until then, however, it's a Cold Warera arms race with both sides racing towards different goalsthe "makers," as I call them, want their devices to live up to their potential, to do more, to share information with other tinkerers and tweakers; and Sony, well, they want to sell you lots of games and have you repurchase your DVD collection on UMDs.

Read this book, but don't think of it as the best collection of clever hacks and projects for the PSPthink of it as a set of keys that unlocks an almost magical piece of hardware that's normally boundthe more you put into it, the more useful and fun your PSP becomes.

Phillip Torrone