Chapter 13. The Logistics of Homebrew

The last intrepid chapter told you all about homebrew in terms of why it exists, its legalities, and other such stuff. Homebrew sounds exciting, doesn't it? Imagine, free apps and games for your PSP! Just think, you can make that gadget do things Sony never thought of (or if it did, it still didn't make them possible).

What can you do with homebrew? All sorts of things! First, and most important, you can play independently developed games. Not every game has to come on a UMD and cost 40 bucks. The world is full of game developers who program for the fun of it and share their works for free. They may lack the backing of major publishers, but that doesn't stop them from producing highly playable and enjoyable titles.

With homebrew, you can browse and manipulate files on the Memory Stick Duo without having to connect the PSP to a computer. You can listen to music streamed from the Internet. You can send and receive instant messages across the Net. You can turn the PSP into a drum machine and play rhythms while your friends boogie.

Homebrew coders are an imaginative bunch. Often working alone or in very small groups, they turn the PSP into all sorts of things, from an ebook reader to a Wi-Fi sniffer. They push the limitations of the PSP beyond what anyone ever expected, and the only thing stopping them from turning it into a superweapon through which you could rule the world are the system's own limits.

The homebrew you can run on your PSP depends upon the version of its firmware. If you're lucky enough to have version 1.50, you can run pretty much any homebrew ever created. Even those of us who have patched it up to 2.60, or whose PSPs contained newer firmware revisions upon purchase, can run some homebrew. It's only a matter of time before somebody cracks versions 2.70 and 2.71, and homebrew will live on. In fact, people are already writing programs for those recent versions that run on the newly introduced Macromedia Flash player they include.

Assuming that you haven't patched your PSP beyond version 2.60, jump into the world of homebrew, and see what you discover. Scour the Web for games and apps of all varieties. Enjoy!