Homebrew — Tag

I have recently been playing with homebrew for PSP. There are some awesome gems out there, and I have found two brilliant programs.

The first is called WiFi Controller. It turns your PSP into a wireless controller for you PC. Follow the instructions, it involves downloading PPJoy, setting up a virtual joystick and such. But in the end you’ll have a wireless controller. It is awesome. I only have one game that takes joysticks, one from the mid-nineties called Gex, and it works perfectly. The only drawback of course is the power sucking wireless usage, though I got a fair hour usage out of 20% battery life. Definitely worth a look into. (This even works in Vista.)

The next one also involves wireless. As you probably know, Sony has LocationFree Players, which lets you stream television to wherever you want, such as your PSP. Well, PIMPStreamer does the same thing, but it’s free and only requires your PC and wireless. It can stream media from your PC straight to your PSP, even over the internet. I haven’t tried it over the internet yet, though that might require effort.

It was inevitable. A TIFF image exploit was found in all 2.01+ PSP’s just a couple of weeks ago. And now, 2.71 gets a downgrader. This will let you fling your PSP back to version 1.50, a golden time for PSP homebrew. But, don’t fret. By using DevHook, you can run the latest firmware without problems, even customize it like Sony never intended.

The “downdater” can be found at PSP Updates. You need a friend with 1.50 already, or download them at Digg.

There is a chance of PSP bricking, so I might just wait a little.

(If you are wondering if you have a TA-082 motherboard, the easy way to find out is by popping open the UMD drive and looking inside PSP. At the top right (of the green board inside it), if you have any text in there, you have a TA-082 motherboard. Image)

While we still wait to hear details of Sony’s homebrew offerings of the PS3 (we know it runs on Linux, but no one knows how exactly yet), Microsoft announces what it is going to do.

Called XNA Game Studio Express, it will be a free program available to anyone who wishes to make games for the Xbox 360. On top of that, for a US$99 annual fee, you can join a “Creators Club,” and share your work with others.

XNA Game Studio Express will be allowed to make commercial Windows games, but only non-commercial X360 games.

However, there is a couple of catches. Some of them probably easy to overcome,

These requirements include that the intended recipient of the content must be logged in to Xbox Live and have an active subscription to the XNA Creators Club, must have downloaded the XNA Framework runtime environment for the Xbox 360, and must have XNA Game Studio Express installed on their own development PC.

The person who wants to play your game then needs to download the source code and then recompile it on their computers and transfer it over to their X360’s in order to play. You also cannot put it on a memory card and go over to a friends house with it.

Hopefully Sony will one-up them in that respect. As said, it comes with Linux and it is already known what libraries they are using in games. This may make Sony issue a statement soon.

The XNA FAQ is also available to read now.