Sony's PlayStation Portal Hacked To Run Emulated PSP Games (theverge.com) 12
An anonymous reader shares a report: Sony's new PlayStation Portal has been hacked by Google engineers to run emulated games locally. The $199.99 handheld debuted in November but was limited to just streaming games from a PS5 console and not even titles from Sony's cloud gaming service. Now, two Google engineers have managed to get the PPSSPP emulator running natively on the PlayStation Portal, allowing a Grand Theft Auto PSP version to run on the Portal without Wi-Fi streaming required. "After more than a month of hard work, PPSSPP is running natively on PlayStation Portal. Yes, we hacked it," says Andy Nguyen in a post on X. Nguyen also confirms that the exploit is "all software based," so it doesn't require any hardware modifications like additional chips or soldering. Only a photo of Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories running on the PlayStation Portal has been released so far, but Nguyen may release some videos to demonstrate the exploit at the weekend.
Relevance of "Google Engineers"? (Score:2)
That seems completely irrelevant to the story at best, and a bit confusing at worst, with the chance someone mistakenly thought Google actively drove this versus being the place that happens to provide these folks' day jobs.
Relevant (Score:2)
Andy's bio states:
i.e.: he specialises in investigating vulnerabilities.
in other words: hacking shit is actually his job descrition.
(But yeah, the fact that he usually does it at Google isn't relevant, and TFS on /. could have emphasized that day job better)
Don't buy it. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, that's what always strikes me about these efforts. There's no shortage of devices capable of running PPSSPP, no reason to buy and then fight the vendor to have the device do what you want it to.
In a context where there aren't better choices, I guess I can see it. Back in the day hacking a PS2 to run games off the hard drive, ok, sure, that was a feature that consoles wouldn't otherwise have that generation, PS2 emulators were not viable, and there was a wider division between what a "TV" was and what
Re: (Score:2)
I'm all for people hacking Sony products but it's better to buy devices that aren't locked down in the first place. You can get a variety of good portable devices for running a PSP emulator in the $50-$100 range.
I genuinely read this as some engineers wanted to try to make a Sony product do something that it absolutely was designed not to do. Not really as a, "Everybody should buy this so that it can be hacked to do this thing!" situation. It's a proof of concept, not a final mod (TFA even lists that there's not a mod released yet).
Re: (Score:2)
But even if it were a 'final mod', it seems self defeating to hop on that back and fourth of "I have a mod, whoops, Sony blocks the older firmware from doing it's stated purpose and disables the mod in an update".
As far as I could tell, the world seems to largely ignore the hell out of the PS Portal, so it's not even modding a wildly successful product to jailbreak it. It's design seems.. sort of janky really. It would look to be the bottom of the list for platforms I'd want to use an emulator on, even if
Re: (Score:2)
Buying a Sony device for $200 to spite Sony, that'll... uhh... really show them?
Obviously (Score:2)
Phones can probably do it. Well, android ones.
Given that internally the Sony Portal is running Android, it's not a surprise they eventually managed.
I suspect an element of spite,
Yup, Sony's official statement is that the Portal is streaming only and there wouldn't be any way to run games directly on it.
So these guys' effort are basically a big "Well actually, ..." regardng that last point.
Retroid (Score:2)
Buy a Retroid 3+ or similar handheld specifically designed for this purpose. It's cheaper, and far, far more open (running Android). In addition to running PSP you can run PS1, PS2, Wii, Gamecube, on and on.