PSP Hackers Go Retro

ByteWoopy writes "Hello World!' That's the traditional phrase that programmers display when they create their first piece of software for an unfamiliar operating system. Owners of Sony's handheld PSP game system were delighted to hear May 5 that a hacker had managed to write a small program that displayed those words on a PSP. They wondered what would be next. As it turned out, it only took hackers five days to go from 'Hello World' to Mario World. On May 10, sites like PSP Hacker reported that a Japanese hacker known only by the name Mr. Mirakichi had developed a program called RIN that let the PSP play software written for the original black-and-white Nintendo Game Boy system.'"

Comments

Re:Hello World, Goodbye Gameboy

[FLAGGR]

1. It's illegal
2. It only works on Jap 1.0 firmware
3. PSP is teh ghey
4. PSP is *not* powerful enough to emulate the DS and all its hardware, emulation isn't easy at all, even pentium 4's cant emualte DS at fullspeed (not implying DS is anywhere close to the power of a P4, just explaining how difficult emulation is)
5. You couldn't control/view DS games properly.

I know I loose any chance at getting modded anything but troll for the 3rd reason, but oh well, at least im still 80% imformative :)

Re:Hello World, Goodbye Gameboy

[alvinrod]

I think that Nintendo mostly doesn't care about whether or not someone has hacked the firmware because people aren't using it to pirate games. When it comes to protecting their games, Nintendo takes the cake. The N64 used carts which no one wants to steal, the GC uses non-standard discs that Nintendo apparently controls the distrobution of. The DS uses carts as well if I'm not mistaken. Because no one goes around selling blanks and a machine to write data onto them, they're not to concerned.

Now if some website had a DS emulator for a PC, they'd probably be a little more irked about that. However, from your description of the DS, and the fact that N64 emulators aren't very good (probably because no one wants to bother making a good one or optimizing the ones that already exist. I mean, it's an N64, there aren't too many great games on it that don't have better versions on the GC or SNES.) makes me think this is unlikely. But I don't see a PSP having a problem with a regular Gameboy game.

Essentially what I'm saying is that this takes away an advantage the DS has with a huge back-library of games. What it boils down to is which system will have better games or features, because the playing field is a little more even.

Nothing new

[b1t r0t]

I read last week that you could get homebrews to run on the 1.0-J firmware, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't news even then. After RTFA, this is the same thing that I already knew.

Wake me up when this works on a current US firmware release.

Now that my rant is done with, I will say that I expect the PSP to be broken for homebrews eventually, probably through some kind of buffer overflow exploit like the one in 007 Agent Under Fire (?) for Xbox. You may have to carry a UMD of some particular game around and use it every time you want to run a homebrew, though.