
Trinity: PSP Emulator Escape - zdw
https://theofficialflow.github.io/2019/06/18/trinity.html
======
vanadium
I’m deep into the console preservation, restoration, and modification scene
personally as an active contributor, and in talking to another friend in the
community tonight around this article, it wouldn’t surprise either of us if
most if not all of the exploits from the link were happily held in community
embargo until a safe distance after the date Sony officially discontinued its
support for the Vita had passed. There’s been a real flurry of “jailbreak”
activity from the community since Sony decided to walk away from the Vita,
despite some niche third-party manufacturers like Limited Run Games still
supporting the system with new physical releases.

That said, while the Acekards and R4s made the Nintendo DS by far the most
accessible vector for piracy and homebrew, exploits made the PSP ground zero
for multi-system emulation fans. The PSP display was significantly better and
the system, prior to the 3DS, was significantly more powerful.

We're about to see the Vita assume the PSP's place on that mantle, it looks
like.

~~~
Causality1
Are you sure about that? "Phone in a bluetooth gamepad" seems like a much
larger install base with many other obvious advantages.

~~~
ascagnel_
The issue with "Phone in a BT gamepad" is that it requires you to constantly
take the phone in and out of said grip/gamepad. It never caught on because
it's a terrible user experience.

~~~
kawsper
And for me, I would like not to drain my phone battery on games, so a gaming
handheld is the solution for me, but I guess i'm in the minority.

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bin0
When I read stuff like this, I sometimes pause and think how wonderful it is I
have access to so much information. Reading interesting pieces like this is
one of my greatest hobbies; thank you to the author.

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JansjoFromIkea
I'm from Europe and therefore missed out on an absolute ton of games from
Japan through the 90s. Bought a PSP on launch for the sole purpose of playing
Japanese Super Nintendo games in an environment more convenient than the
family computer.

Think I bought about 10 PSP games in total (although the library was pretty
damn good looking iirc) but its my favourite machine of all time purely
because of how it granted me access to all these PS1 and SNES games that never
game out in Europe.

Still use the PSP quite a bit for emulation (and Lumines), the original models
have aged pretty beautifully imo.

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nonbirithm
This is really incredible. Enough motivation and unaudited C code can get one
really far on building console exploits.

That said, I wonder about a hypothetical world decades from now where new game
technology uses safer languages like Rust instead of C primarily. The gain in
stability would be offset by making finding exploits like this much harder, if
not impossible. People might pine for the days where you could just download a
custom C toolchain, compile a piece of homebrew and be able to run it on your
own console somehow.

~~~
nineteen999
Regardless of how popular Rust becomes, I cannot see C going away or fading
into complete obscurity within decades from now.

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TheOfficialFloW
Thanks for posting it here. I hope you enjoy the reading!

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DigitalTerminal
Jesus, TheFloW is an actual, real life wizard.

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lostgame
'As the PS Vita™ is the successor of the PSP™, which was _the_ most popular
handheld back then'

[citation needed]

I'm seeing 154.02 million Nintendo DS units vs. 80–82 million PSP's. AFAIK the
DS was _much_ more popular 'back then'...

~~~
p1necone
Might have been referring to it's popularity within the homebrew scene.

~~~
leggomylibro
The DS was pretty popular for homebrew; the microSD card adapter cartridges
were impressive feats of engineering which made it very easy to load custom
code. I remember ebook and graphic novel readers, paint apps, Linux, emulators
for a few simple systems like the SNES, a C SDK, the whole nine yards. It
wasn't as fast as the PSP, but there were still some pretty amazing projects,
like this homage to Portal:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20160203155724/http://smealum.ne...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160203155724/http://smealum.net/ASDS/)

Sad to see that link rot is starting to set in with many of the projects that
I mentioned above. For example, the SNES emulator:

[http://snemul.com/ds/](http://snemul.com/ds/)

~~~
baroffoos
That portal homebrew sounds very interesting but my memory of the time
remembers that DS homebrew was used almost exclusively for piracy but from
what I have heard PSP homebrew was used a lot for stuff like playing music and
running actual custom tools.

~~~
Vanit
I used my PSP to read lecture slides on the way to uni. :)

~~~
bpye
My PSP is still the best device I have for running emulators on a portable.
The physical controls beat anything else I've tried - without being nearly as
bulky as strapping your phone into an Xbox controller.

