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PSP Developer Interview
zmcnulty writes "Over at TechJapan, we've finished our three part translation of Game Watch's interview of Mr. Izumi Kawanishi, one of the PSP's lead designers. New details revealed include a few about the USB interfacing (with both PS2 and PC), a small hint about the elusive battery life, and best of all, that game saves can indeed be copied from Memory Stick to PC by using the PSP's USB interface. Here's part one, part two, part three, and the original Japanese interview."
The matter of whether or not UMD+-RW drives are available is irrelevant, as seen from previous cases of console piracy.
The Dreamcast GD-ROMs weren't readable by a PC, but that didn't stop pirates from setting up a serial link from the DC to PC, and writing a program that would dump the disc image to a PC hard drive. As if that wasn't bad enough, the final nail in the Dreamcast's coffin was that an unmodified console could be booted from a CD-R. I don't see the PSP being compatible with common mini-CD and mini-DVD discs, so there's no real worry there.
The Gamecube uses another proprietary format which is unreadable by PCs. A couple of years passed, and somebody found an exploit in Phantasy Star Online that allowed unsigned code to be uploaded into the Gamecube through the broadband adapter and executed. First, just like the Dreamcast, somebody figured out how to program the Cube to dump a disc image to the PC's hard drive, but with a LAN connection instead of the Dreamcast's slow serial link. However, pirates still haven't found a way to burn readable media on a modified or unmodified console. That didn't stop them though. Soon after dumped disc images started appearing on the internet, so did "streaming server" applications that allowed Gamecube games to be streamed from a PC over a LAN by dynamically patching the disc-read commands to networking commands.
In theory, with hacked firmware, it would be really easy to set up this type of streaming server/backup device with a PC, a PSP, and a USB cable. The game data could be streamed from a PC/Laptop into the PSP. Of course, not too many portable gamers would go this route because it would leave them anchored to their PCs just to play games. However, there's another way I could see them pulling it off.
IIRC, the storage capacity of Sony's UMD is ~1.8 gigabytes. Currently, you can purchase Memory Sticks ranging from 128MB to 2GB in size. With the right firmware hacks, somebody could easily store an entire PSP game on one memory stick, or more if the game required multiple discs, and load it from a boot menu embedded into the PSP's firmware. The real prblem for Sony if this was to catch on, would be that people would most likely prefer playing their games from a memory stick due to the increase in battery life loading from solid-state media Vs. a UMD.
Although it would be great for geeks like us, being able to load Linux into the PSP and play around with it, among other things, the asshat pirates always have to ruin it for everybody else, and it would be used more for mass piracy than something really useful.