Trinity: PSP Emulator Escape | Hacker News Reader

Trinity: PSP Emulator Escape

theofficialflow.github.io

142 pointszdw28 comments

I’m deep into the console preservation, restoration, and modification scene personally as an active contributor, and in talking to another friend in the community tonight around this article, it wouldn’t surprise either of us if most if not all of the exploits from the link were happily held in community embargo until a safe distance after the date Sony officially discontinued its support for the Vita had passed. There’s been a real flurry of “jailbreak” activity from the community since Sony decided to walk away from the Vita, despite some niche third-party manufacturers like Limited Run Games still supporting the system with new physical releases.

That said, while the Acekards and R4s made the Nintendo DS by far the most accessible vector for piracy and homebrew, exploits made the PSP ground zero for multi-system emulation fans. The PSP display was significantly better and the system, prior to the 3DS, was significantly more powerful.

We're about to see the Vita assume the PSP's place on that mantle, it looks like.

FWIW, Limited Run games are now on their last 16 Vita games, and AFAIK all of them have been manufactured.

And all of those games are physical releases -- having a hacked system wouldn't necessarily give you much of a benefit in those cases.

Are you sure about that? "Phone in a bluetooth gamepad" seems like a much larger install base with many other obvious advantages.

The issue with "Phone in a BT gamepad" is that it requires you to constantly take the phone in and out of said grip/gamepad. It never caught on because it's a terrible user experience.

And for me, I would like not to drain my phone battery on games, so a gaming handheld is the solution for me, but I guess i'm in the minority.

Indeed I hold them off for a year and only released them after Sony has officially ended the production.

When I read stuff like this, I sometimes pause and think how wonderful it is I have access to so much information. Reading interesting pieces like this is one of my greatest hobbies; thank you to the author.

I'm from Europe and therefore missed out on an absolute ton of games from Japan through the 90s. Bought a PSP on launch for the sole purpose of playing Japanese Super Nintendo games in an environment more convenient than the family computer.

Think I bought about 10 PSP games in total (although the library was pretty damn good looking iirc) but its my favourite machine of all time purely because of how it granted me access to all these PS1 and SNES games that never game out in Europe.

Still use the PSP quite a bit for emulation (and Lumines), the original models have aged pretty beautifully imo.

This is really incredible. Enough motivation and unaudited C code can get one really far on building console exploits.

That said, I wonder about a hypothetical world decades from now where new game technology uses safer languages like Rust instead of C primarily. The gain in stability would be offset by making finding exploits like this much harder, if not impossible. People might pine for the days where you could just download a custom C toolchain, compile a piece of homebrew and be able to run it on your own console somehow.

Regardless of how popular Rust becomes, I cannot see C going away or fading into complete obscurity within decades from now.

Thanks for posting it here. I hope you enjoy the reading!

Jesus, TheFloW is an actual, real life wizard.

'As the PS Vita™ is the successor of the PSP™, which was the most popular handheld back then'

[citation needed]

I'm seeing 154.02 million Nintendo DS units vs. 80–82 million PSP's. AFAIK the DS was much more popular 'back then'...

Your comment is not relevant to this article.

Sure the parent's comment is pedantic, but it does address a factual inaccuracy. Although, you could argue that the article's phrasing was hyperbolic. Either way it highlights the tone of the article.

Might have been referring to it's popularity within the homebrew scene.

I'd say at the time, certainly, but since flash carts like the R4 have become more common, the amount of DS home-brew and the quality of the scene, at least, as a home-brew dev for both over the years, seems to have exceeded it, especially in terms of longevity. But that could totally be my own experience.

I didn't pick up a PSP-1000 until maybe two years after it came out? Emulation on that was fantastic, minus the ghosting on the screen. It's still one of my favourite ways to play Sega Genesis games on the go, and even handled GBA titles like a champ.

The DS was pretty popular for homebrew; the microSD card adapter cartridges were impressive feats of engineering which made it very easy to load custom code. I remember ebook and graphic novel readers, paint apps, Linux, emulators for a few simple systems like the SNES, a C SDK, the whole nine yards. It wasn't as fast as the PSP, but there were still some pretty amazing projects, like this homage to Portal:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160203155724/http://smealum.ne...

Sad to see that link rot is starting to set in with many of the projects that I mentioned above. For example, the SNES emulator:

http://snemul.com/ds/

That portal homebrew sounds very interesting but my memory of the time remembers that DS homebrew was used almost exclusively for piracy but from what I have heard PSP homebrew was used a lot for stuff like playing music and running actual custom tools.

The DS has both of these. Source: I had one of these cards and may have used it for both ;)

I used my PSP to read lecture slides on the way to uni. :)

My PSP is still the best device I have for running emulators on a portable. The physical controls beat anything else I've tried - without being nearly as bulky as strapping your phone into an Xbox controller.

And recoding movies into low-bitrate mp4 of a flavour the PSP could play. Nice for watching movies on the train and such things, before that was really feasible on mobile phones.

Yes it was, I was one of those folks who did that. I had a PSP when I was in college and couldn't afford a smartphone/smartphone plan(2007-2009, this was before unlimited calls/texts, and data was obscenely expensive), but the college was blanketed in WiFi so I could use my PSP essentially as a smartphone to browse the internet, listen to music, play games, etc. The PSP could also play PS1 games (natively IIRC), so I was able to play a bunch of PS1 games on the go too.

I sold it off when I got a smartphone, but I do miss that PSP from time to time.

Yeah. I used my PSP to listen to internet radio and as a simple web browser(Lynx browser with the unique phone-layout keypad for text input anyone?). I've also participated in several different games coding competitions, that's actually how I got properly into coding, nowadays I work as a games programmer and that wouldn't have happened if not for the PSP.

I remember a guy who mounted his PSP on the handlebars of his motorbike and used it for navigation with a GPS dongle. No rerouting but turn by turn instructions to get us to follow a pre-planned route :)

Citation is definitely needed, but I would suggest that it depends on your definition of popularity. I think the PSP was king at least in terms of desirability. (I may be biased though as my web development career started with making PSP portals ) PSP was substantially more expensive than the DS which would have affected the sales (especially when the DS was such a worthwhile console to own.)

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