PSP Firmware Broken - Emulation for All

ZiakII writes "Endgadget is reporting that the PSP firmware 1.50 has been broken." From the article: "a group called PsP-Dev have apparently confirmed successful a homebrew bootstrap on 1.50 (no word on 1.51 or 1.52). What's that mean for the indie developer/emulation/warez communities? Well, pretty much the same as before--use your hardware the way you want it. For SNES emulation, that is. Obviously." Tom's Hardware has the story as well.

Comments

Not Compatible with 1.51 or 1.52

[TheBashar]

The article has been updated to indicate this is not compatible with firmware versions 1.51 or 1.52.

Not their business model

[fmaxwell]

one of these days, a manufacturer would figure out that the best part of consoles/handhelds is that they are actually very versitile pieces of hardware.

The business model for most manufacturers is to sell the consoles at a loss (or close to it) and make money from licensing deals with big-name game publishers. If I buy a PSP to run a web browser, e-mail client, and various other freeware apps, Sony either loses money or makes not enough to justify the sale. They want me to buy commercial games, for which they get licensing fees.

Take TiVo as an example, they don't officially support mods to thier box, but they have forums for the mods built right in to the official TiVo Bulletin Board. People love TiVo, and (before cable company DVRs) won the DVR war, hands down.

TiVo's business model is selling subscriptions to their service. If you put a web server in your TiVo, an ethernet card, a cache card, bigger hard drives, and so forth does nothing to harm their subscription revenue screen. In fact, the more you invest in the box, both in time and money, the LESS likely you are to drop their subscription service.

Re:You mean like a GBA and N-Gage?

[EGSonikku]

I can't speak for the n-gage, but as far as the GBA, SNES emulation is sss-lll-oo---wwwww

Im talking 1/2 speed on basic games, and forget sound, not to mention on the GBA you are missing 2 buttons. Also, due to the resolution of the GBA screen you lose a decent amount of the image to cropping, making some games even less playable then they already were due to the speed and button issues.

SNES emulation on PSP when run in 333MHz mode is essentially full speed (50 - 60fps) with sound at the moment. And those *minor* fps issues will likely be gone wit some optimising. And the screen resolution is higher than the SNES, and it features the needed buttons for input.

The "hype" isn't because it's a Sony handheld. The hype is because it has the specifications needeed to run these emulators decently.