All About PSP

Engadget has video from the June 2009 episode of Qore that shows the new PSP Go. It has a slide out gamepad, 16GB internal storage, bluetooth, and a memory slot of some sort. We’re naturally curious about its potential as a homebrew platform. Will Sony take the mature route they did with the PS3 and let you run Linux or will they continue the firmware arms race the PSP is known for? We’ll be hearing more about this platform at E3 next week.

Avi sent in his PSP as a status monitor hack(zip). He’s using Lua on the PSP, so you have to install LuaPlayer. The computer side is written in python, so it should be cross platform. Last time we saw a psp as an extra monitor, it had more capabilities, but it was limited to Windows. You’ll find the Lua script as well as the python in the zip file. It’s a nice use for an extra psp.

Follow along with this project and you could use your PSP as a display for your computer. The software, available for download on the site, gives you a 960×544 display. The data is compressed, sent to the PSP, then decompressed for display. Though that sounds clunky, the video after the break shows it working pretty smoothly with some Winamp visualization. Only 32 bit Windows XP or older is supported currently.

foo sent in this amazingly well done mod to add an SNES controller to a PSP. He was contacted with a request to mod a PSP for someone who had limited use of one hand. The PSP controls were too difficult for her, but miraculously, she could play an SNES controller well. The quality of the mod is very nice. [foo] has added a port on the back that the controller plugs into. Other than the port on the back, the PSP looks completely stock and functions fine. When plugged in, the cable and plug act as a stand for the PSP too.

Peripheral manufacturer Datel has been hard at work attempting to crack the PSP 3000 since its release. They’ve developed the Lite Blue Tool battery to force the PSP into service mode so hackers can run any arbitrary code they want. According to MaxConsole, Datel performed a silicon level investigation of the PSP’s chips to determine how to break into service mode. This means they decapsulated the the chips and reverse engineered any cryptographic protections. We’d love to hear exactly what chips were being used since some are fundamentally flawed.