The 20 year old PSP can now connect to WPA2 WiFi Networks | Hacker News Reader

The 20 year old PSP can now connect to WPA2 WiFi Networks

wololo.net

450 pointszdw123 comments

Is there any kind of technical write up of how this was accomplished? Looking at the Git history of the branch that introduced the plugin[1] was a bit rough, but I did find an interesting commit[2]. That commit looks like it patches some other code (apparently some pspnet_apctl.prx module)[3] but maybe all the discussion was in Discord and it's not been written up elsewhere?

It's probably unreasonable to ask for such details without delving into how PSP software images are structured and learning that ecosystem. Also maybe it's obvious for someone with a more low level understanding of the WPA 1 vs. 2 differences. But here I am unreasonably curious. :)

[1] https://github.com/PSP-Archive/ARK-4/commits/rev160/

[2] https://github.com/PSP-Archive/ARK-4/commit/edcc6f01618e3e45...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/PSP/comments/1igh5c9/wpa2_support/m...

I'm far from an expert, but what is most likely is:

- The underlying firmware for the Marvell WiFi controller that Sony provided when they updated the PSP to support WPA (with AES) also supports WPA2 (with AES).

- Sony never set it up on the userspace side, perhaps for stability reasons or because there was no demand and they preferred playing it safe.

- The patches swap out the userspace bits to talk WPA AES with the ones for a WPA2 AES. The difference isn't huge, it's mostly changing data in some management frames and configuring the key exchange differently.

It's very impressive that that developer found the right things to patch, with the right values.

Looks like it has been in the works for a while.

https://psp-archive.github.io/apps/wpa2.html

https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/04/4865-2/

I'm amazed it was so close all that time and hackers didnt turn it on back then. 20 years ago the internet was just coming into its own as a collaboration platform for large anonymous groups. I remember hackers set up a public website where you could annotate blocks of the PSP firmware as you reverse engineered it.

I remember the cat and mouse game with sony on the swaploit and eventually hacked firmare being released. I remember when the first psp dev kit was released on linux. I had a macbook but tried it bc it was just a huge shell script. Imagine my glee when, after 5 minutes of chunking spinning rust. I was able to compile code for the PSP! Then I remember the first time someone figured out how to send graphics commanda to its gpu and also how to change the cpu speed between 111/222/333 MHz.

I remember the first euro-style demo I saw by Alonetrio, which I modified to create PSPKick. Then came the first Atari 2600 emu and then then the first C64 emu. The spirit of collaboration was lively, jovial, fraternal, and celebratory!

Thanks for that perspective and detail, it makes a lot of sense. The first link also has some very nice establishing context for the environment. I'd still love to read the technical journey of the developer because I agree it is very impressive.

Yeah so basically the Marvell Libertas 88W8380 supports 802.11i (also known as WPA2) out of the box: https://uofw.github.io/upspd/docs/hardware/Libertas_WLAN_cli...

The module patches the PSP kernel WPA module to make it use the native WPA2 capability of the chip/firmware instead of WPA.

Absolutely love the PSP - it was such a mind blowing piece of hardware at the time. The portables in my life were an iPod and a Game Boy Advance. Then a buddy of mine showed me the model he had just imported from Japan running Wipeout - it was hard to believe my eyes.

It truly felt like the future in a way very few pieces of tech have managed to pull off since. One of Sony’s peak accomplishments.

I had a PSP and also loved it, but I don’t feel like it was that mind blowing. The tricks they pulled made it less impressive IMO. Most games felt like cheap pantomime versions of what you wanted them to be, you’d buy something and then go “oh, never mind”.

The homebrew scene was much more impressive than anything official, if you ask me.

I could see this as an adult, but as a kid, this thing was killer.

I remember thinking: "Whoa, burnout 3 is something I play on the big screen in the living room, and now it looks the same and I can play it on a handheld device?" (it definitely didn't look the same, but I was about 5 when it came out, so I never paid much attention to the differences. Also sorry if I'm making you feel old).

I also remember it being the first to do a joystick on a handheld. That was pretty cool.

Some of the games were awesome. I spent a lot of time playing the star wars battlefront game on there. And armored core formula front, wipeout, a few others.

You’re not wrong that a lot of them felt hollow. Like that assassin’s creed game that had virtually nobody walking around on the street and felt like a dead world as a result.

But there were some gems.

Cry. Bloodlines was something I worked on and was quite proud of. But you can't please everyone.

Sorry!

I love the AC franchise and have been playing it* since the beginning. I know it was because of the limited power of the platform that you couldn't have the usual crowds of bystanders etc. I'm sure it was a great game in general, it just felt like a bit of a ghost town :/

(* on and off, I took a break around 3/black flag after a bit of burnout)

As I mentioned in other comments we only had 9 months from zero to finished original game with no source code or help from a very busy Ubisoft other than some reference assets (which were completely redone for the PSP). If we had more time, another year, bigger crowds would have been a high priority!

the homebrew scene is what got me into programming. i knew some of the great minds back then and really idolized what they were able to pull off.

It was the first handheld device I had with a web browser, years before I got my iPod touch

That 2.0 update was mind-blowing on its own. Smallest device you could browse the web with, I think? Pretty sure it was still the time of PDAs, before smartphones.

EDIT: Yeah, July 2005, 2 years before the iPhone came out.

https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/254588/psp-2-0-upda...

> Smallest device you could browse the web with, I think?

I'd contest that the Blackberry devices were smaller and earlier, e.g the 7230 from 2003[0]. Pretty sure some of the iPAQs (and other CE devices) arrived with wifi and a browser before 2005 as well since Pocket PC 2000 shipped with a version of IE 3.1.

[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-evolution-of-the-blackberry-f...

Handspring Trio had a web browser by (before?) 2003 with a touchscreen. I loved mine!

It wasn't until 2009 - which is also when my family got WiFi (and switched from dial-up) - that I got mine: a Nintendo DSi.

Objectively, that browser was terrible, even at the time. But the ability to just read text on my own (and not have to ask to use the family computer - and to stay up all night reading under the covers, which was much harder with books) was amazing then! Of course, it would seem so quaint to kids today.

Yeah. As a high schooler I just wanted to use AIM on it, but all the web-based AIM clients required Flash at the time, which wasn't supported in the PSP browser.

So I ended up hacking together a site called AIMonPSP with PHP and MySQL that did all the AIM communication on the server instead of client-side. Made a decent amount of money (for a high schooler) on AdSense banners, and learned a lot about software design the hard way.

what kind of server did you Host it on? local Desktop? and how did it manage traffic and bandwidth?

Started on a VPS and then scaled to a single larger dedicated server through a hosting company. It was never doing crazy amounts of traffic, maybe 1-2k concurrent users at peak, and the frontend was just doing slow polling every few seconds.

I feel a bit hurt. ;-)

I worked on a bunch of PSP titles, my personal favourite was Bloodlines - are you not entertained?

Tell us more! I still beleieve that the PSP is a killer platform, those games are beautiful with 60 fps mods at high resolutions. I never really stopped playing them, just moved them to my phone.

+1, tell us more.

Personally back in the days I had Nintendo DSi, but just recently I bought gamepad for phone just to check what I have missed by not owning PSP at that time :)

I can tell you how surprised I was to find out that index triangles were slower than triangle lists on the PSP due to (I conjecture) a broken vertex cache in the PSP graphics hardware (guessing it was rushed out with this bug). The huge challenge of clipping triangles on the PSP - they had to be clipped on the CPU. I loved working on the PSP and wished we could have done more PSP projects.

Despite the limitations, many games pulled off amazing graphics. Many in the thread compare it to the PS2, but that's unfair. Doing better than PS1 graphics in a handheld was quite an accomplishment back then. Interestingly, the quality of the assets in these games didn't have a chance to show on the 480x272 screen of the PSP. However, many games, including Bloodlines, Gran Turismo, both GTA's, just to name a few, look very close to PS2 when upscaled. So the work was very much put into these titles, and it shows, even after two decades.

I recall Bloodlines as not being a bad game, but not particularly good either. I think the biggest problem with PSP is that lots of games were just diet ports of PS2 games. Why play them if you can play better versions of same games on PS2? Having said that, there were absolute gems in the library, and it breaks my heart that in some alternative universe I haven't played Patapon or LocoRoco.

Bloodlines was not a diet port. It was an original. Given what we had to do and the timeframe we had (9 months) we had to go from zero to finished game and it was a terrific challenge. We had no original source code so everything you see, including the mobile version of parkour, all the game systems, complete pipeline from Maya had to be designed and built as well as getting a game finished. I truly believe the project was a AAA endeavour but with a AA budget and timeframe. Assassin's Creed, the original game has a much larger scope but also a much larger team and a four year development time. Bloodlines if only given an additional months to a year could have been outstanding. I'm still very proud of the accomplishment of our team given our constraints.

As someone involved in the game production, you saw all the hard work and miracles that happened. It's your child and you love it even if it's imperfect. As audience, I compare this game to a different one, without any regard to the constrains you had. Heck, I'll give your game a bad score simply because I don't like the genre, in which case there's absolutely nothing you could've done to improve my experience.

I just grabbed my PSP and took a look at the save file of Bloodlines. It says "Percentage completed: 0", which is super strange, because I distinctly remember playing the game as a kid when visiting my aunt. Maybe I actually enjoyed the game, but the savefile got fucked, I got angry, and never played it again? My memories are hazy, but now that I focus, I do remember enjoying it, but not much beyond that.

BTW when looking at the save files, what strikes me is how few games I actually played. To me it seems like there were lots of them, but actually no, I just spent lots of time playing same games.

When you think about it too long, the fact that one day you're a kid, and then you're not a kid anymore is super strange

I'm impressed! Bloodlines was the only AC I've ever finished completely, and even though the story was odd at some points, I found the gameplay and the graphics to be spot on for the platform. Very enjoyable for teenager me back then, and still holds up quite well. Doing this in 9 months... Just wow.

been long time but I recall playing it on PSP, ( before playing the AC game before though ) I have pretty good memories, and it was one of the best games I played on PSP for sure.

I think maybe Sony created too high expectations with PSP.

I loved my PSP and the homebrew scene during that era. The biggest area where the PSP felt like it was lacking was with multiplayer games. I remember playing some fighting and puzzle games with friends on the PSP, but the most fun wireless multiplayer experiences were on the DS; and primarily it was Mario Kart DS. The real killer feature was being able to play with friends without requiring them to own the game; I don't think PSP games were capable of this.

For some reason the DS didn't take off at all in the area I grew up (neither did the original Pokémon games despite seemingly being massive everywhere and the cartoon being a big hit in my school).

it was only like ten years later when I got to realise how great those download play titles must have been for some kids. PSP games would have been way too large to pull off similar stuff, DS games were often only a few megabytes

Maybe it's just because it was high school and not elementary school, but I remember basically everyone who was into games even a bit having a DS, but nobody used them as a daily carry portable. It was something you'd just notice in people's rooms when you went over.

There were some games that had a feature called game sharing. This let you send a smaller version of the game, essentially a demo, to another PSP over wifi, and this let you at least try the experience without owning the game. Burnout Legends definitely did this, but I also remember it on some NFS and sports titles. I just found a list of games that did this.[0] Also, there were some good shooters as well, like Medal of Honor or Battlefront, with pretty nice maps, especially for a handheld. And for racing games, Gran Turismo was incredible with almost all GT5 tracks and 900+ cars present.

[0] https://www.lifewire.com/psp-games-with-gameshare-2792549

> I don't think PSP games were capable of this.

They were. You could play Tekken against a friend without him having to own the game. It was great.

But in general not many games did this. Since even Tekken had pretty high load times, I suspect that the much higher graphical fidelity of the PSP made most games just too big for this to work well.

I remember being so excited for Bloodlines because I had no way to play AC2. It was really impressive what you and your team managed to accomplish on a handheld. Now knowing that you built it from the ground up makes it even more amazing.

Can you share more about the experience, the development process, and any other PSP titles you worked on?

The PSP was probably the most hyped up gadget in my teenage years. It was launched only after a long delay in Europe, but even after all that time of waiting and the highest of expectations, it delivered. So thank you for being a part of that :)

What other games did you work on?

You worked on AC: Bloodlines?!

I absolutely loved that game. I remember playing it on my white Star Wars PSP with a decal of Darth Vader on the back. I spent so many hours sitting on my bean bag chair playing it.

Thank you for making my childhood more fun :)

I appreciate that! It was a really fun project to be part of.

Disagree.

Most of the games still hold up and emulation is very easy to run. Probably the best handheld of its era.

Only limited by it's controls. KZ was great, they even had to patch in the last chapter, but it was an amazing game.

It was niche outside of Japan but Monster Hunter Freedom/Portable was incredible and wildly more successful than the console edition - the PSP and social monhun parties in Japan validated a brand new IP for Capcom

Admittedly with homebrew it was even more fun when the community patched MHP3 translations and we would have AdHoc wifi parties proxied over the net using a dongle. Good times

I do not agree.

God of war chains of olympus, metal gear solid peace walker, crisis core ff7, test drive unlimited, motor storm artic edge... I could go on.

I don't see a world where a handheld console released in 2005 being able to play these games isn't impressive. And I wonder what homebrew could offer to match these games too.

Homebrew made the PSP a killer emulation machine way ahead of its time. You could emulate the original PlayStation, which was how I got around to playing the original Final Fantasy 7 (although I think this also had an official release, my memory is fuzzy). And it could emulate the SNES, which was how I got around to playing Chrono Trigger.

Funnily enough, I remember some rumors going around about some people trying to develop an N64 emulator which never got released or went anywhere, AFAIK. I have a vague memory of a guy going by the ID PSDonkey or something like that.

I played a bit of Super Mario 64 using an early version of Daedalus, so it was more than a rumour :>

Granted, it ran at about 80-90% realtime speed, and audio was a no-go, but maybe that improved in later releases.

As someone who modded my PSP a few years ago I can confirm that Mario 64 now runs fine with working sound, and you can even force it into widescreen

FF7 did get an official PSN release playable on PSP. You could play FF1-9 on PSP by the end of it's life once the port of the DS version of FFIII arrived. There was also a PSN release of the PS1 version of Chrono Trigger, which is actually how I played through it (although perhaps on Vita).

PS1 emulation on the PSP is actually mostly a native Sony feature! Sony has always been very interested in backwards compatibility; initially to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of a new console not having many titles available at launch, but later largely focusing on additional revenue by selling people digital downloads for games they might well already own (because they removed native media compatibility...)

For the PSP, media compatibility was obviously never a possibility, but as I understand it, the native PS1 emulator on the PSP essentially works with completely unmodified PS1 ISOs in some sort of container file format, which homebrew developers have then quickly reverse engineered.

The emulator itself is technically quite impressive, and apparently largely runs unmodified PS1 MIPS R3000 code on the PSP's MIPS R4000, although the GPU is emulated [1].

[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/investigating-the-psps-psone-emula...

Grand Theft Auto 3 (Liberty City Stories) running on the handheld... mind blown.

The homebrew scene is why I still have no idea if the UMD drive in the PSP that I bought new a million years ago has ever worked.

Because while I definitely bought a PSP, I definitely have never bought a UMD-based game to play on it.

It was quite amazing at the time, and (IMHO) it remains a spectacularly-good handheld for playing whatever games with an emulator or whatever.

(Am I the reason why we can't have nice things? Yes, perhaps. Perhaps I am.)

To be fair, Sony released an UMD-less model themselves! Many titles, especially later in the system's life, got a digital/PSN release in addition to the UMD one, and some were even digital exclusive.

It was mind blowing at that time because it felt solid and you can even watch movies on it. Too bad Sony abandoned it. The form factor was amazing even Nintendo and Steam copied it.

It's a cool device but the display was terrible.

I had a PSP and also loved it, but I don’t feel like it was that mind blowing.

Perhaps you came to the PSP late in its cycle.

I happened to be in Tokyo when the PSP was released. I was on a subway and saw a girl playing Lumines and it completely blew my mind.

As soon as I was done with my daytime obligations, I went straight to Yodobashi Camera and bought one. When I got back to the U.S., showing it to people always blew their minds, also.

Until then, the notion of "handheld gaming" was mostly the early GameBoy series, and maybe Lynx. The PSP was a whole different category.

I got a PSP-3000 during high school, and loved it. In addition to playing native and PS1 games, it was a very powerful media player as well. Much more versatile than most phones at the time, especially with its nice, though not very hi-res, screen. The PSP wasn't very common in our area, but I managed to get some friends to get one, and we had a lot of fun with multiplayer too.

I just never felt like there were games worth buying for the PSP. I only ever got three - Crisis Core, FFT, and God of War Chains of Olympus. The system collected dust mostly. My DS got a lot more use, because Nintendo is just better at making games imo.

Wipeout Pure was a absolutely mind blowing in 2004. Nothing on mobile platforms came close to it. It was indeed a portable playstation.

In the right circumstances, Wipeout Pure also was a decent web browser.

Wow! I had no idea about that. Looks like it shipped with a web browser built-in indeed:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/920780-wipeout-pure/204...

I couldn't stomach the cost. At the time you could get a PS2 for the same or less money, do I could never justify a PSP. Nowadays I'm not broke so maybe I could though, but that ingrained mental block of "too expensive" is hard to get past

I mean, it's a PS2, but portable, so more difficult to make and more usable...

It's the only machine I ever got at launch. Utterly gigantic purchase for 14 year old me

This was more than a small part due to the calculation that early models were more likely to be hacked and I'd save myself a lot of money emulating snes games instead of buying new ones...

I was lucky enough to travel with my PSP and played Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. I have no clue how it would detect which country I was in, but you could capture mercenaries and every country I visited seemed to have distinct "soldiers".

Still remember catching a ton of max-leveled soldier's when I was in Russia.

Yeah PSP got the most play time even vs the DS

I never had a PSP but also didn’t really want one after seeing my friend’s. It seemed way too fragile and complicated, not rugged and simple like Nintendo portables.

It also had a bigger problem in that it seemed to be designed for (and built a library of) ports from regular consoles. I’ve always believed full console ports make lousy portable games because they’re not designed for stop-and-go play sessions. I’m not interested in playing through some epic boss battle in God of War while waiting in line at the grocery store. On the other hand, I’m totally fine with playing a few moves in a quick adventure/puzzle/strategy game on a DS.

And that’s the crux of it. PSP seems to be designed for portable play only around the house. In that case I’d rather just have a regular console.

I feel like with sleep mode on the DS, PSP and later handhelds that became mostly moot anyways. There are still great OG Game Boy games I probably wouldn't want to play in the grocery store line (e.g., Link's Awakening) but with sleep mode it doesn't really matter. You just stop whenever, pick up whenever. Arguably the PSP suffered from not going all in on console style gaming with just a single analog stick. SO many games on there suffered from that.

The PSP was definitely more complicated, and perhaps more fragile but it felt incredibly futuristic in early 2005. Graphics basically as good as my home PS2, you could watch really high quality movies, music on the go, browse the web.

> I’ve always believed full console ports make lousy portable games because they’re not designed for stop-and-go play sessions.

I realized this after purchasing a Steam Deck. Initially I installed things like Apex Legends (rip) and Doom Eternal, but even with gyro and trackpads, it's just didn't feel great on a small screen. I will admit playing through the entire Master Chief Collection over various transits made my inner child kind of giddy. But Halo's chapter format and slow-paced combat makes it kind of an unique fit.

On the go I now mostly use my Deck for things like Slay The Spire, Ori, Okami, Hollow Knight, Tails of Iron, Stardew Valley, Baba is You, etc; Docked with a TV, playing the aforementioned FPS is fine. Or party games like Heave-Ho :-).

To be honest, I do kind of wish for a Vita-like, running SteamOS, with enough horsepower to run previously mentioned OTG games. Key factor is to be 'pocketable'.

> And that’s the crux of it. PSP seems to be designed for portable play only around the house. In that case I’d rather just have a regular console.

Sometimes the TV gets relinquished to the other half, in which case its nice to stil snuggle up instead of sequestering yourself to the study.

The impression I have is that 'game playing devices' coming out now are picking points on a speed-quality-cost style trilemma triangle, except it's desktop PC/couch+TV console/portables. All the different products are picking different points in the triangle to see if there's a market, if laptops are a step away from desktops, then the GPD Win is a second step towards portables, the steam deck is third. The software side also answers another desire that a lot of people have which is to have PC games with a more console-like management experience, and the desire for the steambox to do something similar for HTPC form factor never went away.

> It seemed way too fragile and complicated

The thing is an absolute tank. I vividly remember the horror of dropping mine onto a concrete floor from a significant height – with no consequences, other than a minor paint chip.

And the thing features an optical disk drive! Between that and MiniDisc, I'm still convinced that Sony's mechanical engineers are wizards.

> just imported from Japan

Lik-Sang? Good ol' Lik-Sang, before Sony threw them into the ground. So much Japanese video game console eye candy for grabs.

>It truly felt like the future in a way very few pieces of tech have managed to pull off since.

For me it was the Nokia Ngage, and ipod video. And then the airpods.

I have my own special experience with the PSP, totally unrelated to games. Back in 2009 I was deployed to the middle east. At the time, connectivity was difficult: we used phone cards to call back home. One alternative was that you could use Skype on the PSP, and the cost of a call was very cheap. I remember hanging out in random cafes (probably the Cinnabon outside the Navy base in Bahrain) using their Wi-Fi to call home. Thanks for the reminder of a great memory!

2.4 GHz Only

I believe that's a hardware limitation of the radio, which software won't be able to change.

Even the much newer first generation PS4 from 2013/2014 is a 2.4 GHz only wifi device.

It's exceedingly unlikely to find something from the time of the psp in 2003/2004 that has 802.11a 5GHz and isn't a business laptop.

huh 5ghz existed since 1999

Yeah, but certainly wasn't common until 802.11n 5GHz stuff shipped and became in common consumer use. The target market for a psp would have had 802.11b or .g 2.4 GHz only home routers/APs. Think Linksys wrt54g and similar.

Yes and even plenty of 802.11n devices were 2.4Ghz only.

It was actually the first band that wifi supported.

It was not, 802.11 (no letters) and 802.11b were 2.4GHz. the 802.11a standard came later.

We had a fleet of PCMCIA cards for wardriving in the early 2000s, but only one for 802.11a.

It was rare to find, but the networks were left weirdly open, presumably because it was rare, limited range, and they didn't care to troubleshoot security on top of connectivity.

Not with that attitude you can't. Simply overclock the CPU to 5 GHz and connect an antenna to pin 8!

(This comment was inspired by this actually functional crazy project: https://web.archive.org/web/20220104163626/http://www.icrobo... | HN discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Pi+fm)

This is amazing! Saved.

Ham here. This is _nuts_, thanks.

I wonder what a RPi 2040 could accomplish with its dedicated realtime components. Add a variable (center frequency and bandwidth) bandpass circuitry to filter out nasty harmonics and I'd guess you can at least go for purely software transmitting CW (morse code), FM and the various digital modes like DMR that are AFAIK all variations of either straight FM or FSK.

FPGAs are too expensive / require too niche knowledge to pull it off, and regular GPIOs suffer from hardware interrupts...

The other question of course is how to receive, but I guess for that you can use an RTL-SDR...

I wonder if the Marvell Libertas 88W8010 chip could be replaced with one from the same family but with 5 GHz support. That would require additional patches but probably not a whole rewrite.

It’s a beautiful thing that people are still keeping the homebrew PSP scene alive. PSP homebrew is what got me into programming and security in the first place.

Semiconductors are a magical thing, and I’ve always felt like their quick obsolescence is a bit sad.

It’s really lovely to see that we can keep making them useful and relevant.

I can’t think enough how amazing it is: so much time invested in a 20 years old console without any money reward!

PSP was so great that just seeing the screenshot of the WiFi networks trigger in me a nostalgic tear :’)

Sick, I still have mine and now I won't have to turn off security on my hotspot for the PSP to connect. Last year I spot welded a panasonic prismatic cell from a toughbook onto the original psp batt board to get a decent batt. The chinesium ones wouldn't last and my original was long dead.

I wonder if we'll start to see services that allow you to download home-brew directly onto the PSP now (similar to Vita services), instead of having to transfer everything over SD cards.

The PSP is fantastic, I use mine often.

https://brew.psp.place/hb/ has an installable channel on the PSP: https://brew.psp.place/hb/HDStore.prs

The PSP was a masterpiece of a device. Glad people still tinker with them.

Damn it's been 20 years since the PSP.... loved that thing growing up.... So much Monster Hunter Freedom Unite... grabbed mine off the shelf after all this time just to feel it again and the battery is almost 1 inch thick.... Guess it's time to go through some of the old electronics and recycle the batteries before they either off gas, or catch something on fire...

Same. Mine had expanded so much it almost popped the battery panel off. Thankfully replacements are quite cheap! I went through and replaced old ones on my PSPs, DSs, etc and now keep em all charged (with a mess of cables) to hopefully keep em semi healthy and not cause a bonfire in my closet.

That's great, I just started using WPA3. As far as my radio neighbors tell me, I'm the only one.

I love seeing old hardware kept alive by community effort like this.

Would love to see similar for the Sidekick, although I know hardware limitations will make that much less likely to materialize anything meaningful.

I just want to flip it open to respond to a text message one more time.

This is impressive!

I still have my PSP 3000 (bought over a decade ago), which is in great condition, despite the frequency I whip it out and have fun playing the classics.

I mostly just play vanilla single-player games on it, so there's rarely a need to bring it online. But when that occasion appears, it can be really cumbersome. I keep a cheap mobile hotspot around and have it work in WEP mode, just for bridging my PSP to other WiFi networks. I will definitely try this instead.

That said, I think a great feature of PSP (and other old-gen handhelds) is, it can work great while being completely offline. I think I will keep it forever, or until they stop making new batteries for it.

Just in time for WPA3 to begin to be all but required, as WiFi 7 MLO requires strict WPA3.

This is pretty awesome though to see new life breathed into these devices. I know the Vita has a big community around homebrew and emulators.

I still have mine (PSP 1000 ), such an amazing piece of tech. I did an IPS screen mod over covid, it made it 10 times better - no more ghosting of the display and vibrant colours!

I wish someone did this for the Nintendo DS or added WPA3 support to 3DS. I haven't seen any public RE effort going into replacement WiFi modules of those.

It doesn't even have an OS. The launcher would have to dynamically patch the games. Not impossible, but a lot trickier, I guess.

DS games didn't even worked with WPA.

Only DSi Enchanced and 3DS games supported WPA2 at best. Your best bet is using older router with OpenWRT to make WPA3 to WEP bridge.

Problem is that from what I've read, the system firmware is embedded in a module that also serves as WiFi. There is a chance that the firmware could be hacked to enable WPA2, but probably not WPA3.

Please, do not bother the devs on how to install this on your PSP, the plugin is still on the works.

Source: the PSP Discord.

There are two important things about wololo. One they did the jailbreak to PSP. And they made https://github.com/WagicProject/wagic (the best open source alternative to Magic the Gathering).

I bought a PSP last year and now its my main gaming device in 2025. I wish Sony brings it back in some form.

What is more impressive, that Moment fella solved that 20y, considered very hard evident by the in Discord's bot's response, issue within 3d after joining the scene.

When I had a DS Lite when I was younger, it was annoying to me that I couldn't connect to the Wi-Fi at home. (IIRC) It only had WEP, instead of WPA(2?).

I was under the impression that you needed some sort of hardware support for WPA2. Is that not the case?

The thing is - and I tried finding out without success - that it’s likely an off the shelf either Realtek or Broadcom WiFi chipset in the PSP that Sony probably omitted features on for stability reasons. Sounds like maybe these folks made it happen :) amazing to see

Seems like it is Marvell.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090929182619/http://www.arm.co...

Marvell Libertas 88W8010 + Marvell Libertas 88W8380

More info: https://www.psdevwiki.com/psp/Wlan

Datasheet: https://uofw.github.io/upspd/docs/hardware/Libertas_WLAN_cli...

You normally need firmware support for WPA2.

Obviously the availability of firmware is strongly linked to the hardware, and since firmware isn't open source, adding a big feature like WPA2 if it isn't already there is very hard.

However, I believe there is also the option of capturing raw (encrypted) packets and doing all the encryption fully in software.

I don't think so? Isn't the point of the suplicant model introduced in wpa1 that you can upgrade security in software, so upgrading to wpa2 should be possible for most things that ran wpa1 and had a viable way to get software upgrades.

Newer hardware has accelerators for encryption, but that can be done in software too. AFAIK the physical layer is the same, and WEP/WPA/WPA2 are layers on top, implemented by firmware or host software.

Very few of 16-bit PC cards support 11g and/or WPA1, and it was supposed to be hardware/firmware limitation, though I'm not sure of the details either.

Nope, for Wi-Fi the security doesn't sit on the physical or link (radio) layer. It's not an accurate comparison but it's similar to how TLS, too, doesn't sit on the physical or data link layer.

Would love to see the same for Nintendo DS but no chance with this tiny SoC

wow one of the most ad-ridden sites i've ever seen

ublock origin

This is good news

And finally non-political articles here lol

yet another celebration of something that would be banal if there were any attention to true open source movement (no, bsd and mit not n included)

Garbage website

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