I recently moved all my PSP library to a Retroid Pocket 4 Pro, because of battery life and upscaling, but my PSP is still working, the thing is that being able to charge everything with USB-C is really comfortable for me, and I’m really scared of modding a USB-C port on my PSP. The performance on the RP4 is really good.
…I feel sad. I never had a PSP. To me, the PSP feels like “That new Sony handheld”. Then I hear it was released like 25 years ago, and that can’t be true.
So I go look in the mirror, and expect to see my own young babyface. You know people are always saying I look way younger than I am. Constantly getting carded to buy alcohol…they always think I’m 15!
But as I look in the mirror, I no longer see the youthful face that would get carded. Instead the old man in the mirror looks more like my father…if my father had any balls to grow his hair out like a rockstar. But still…it has gone grey. The hairline a slight bit receeded.
This can’t be MY face! Who is this stranger? And then I remember. Years spent wasting my time in a relationship that didn’t love me. Years spent in a house filled with rats which I didn’t have the authority to exterminate. Years dealing with cancer from living in a rat infested hellhole. Somewhere in all that covid was a thing until it wasn’t.
And now, this face looks back at me, still thinking of the PSP as new, and I only have one question…
“What the hell is a Vita???”
The answer is a Vita is the one thing left on this earth that brings joy.
It brought hate back when it was new. Wasn’t like the PSP, too casual, too restricted, rabble pleaser etc. Fans, eh?
Yeah it sucked at launch but modded its amazing.
The music and sound effects are also peak
I loved my PSP. I really can’t believe the resolution was 480 × 272. It seemed a lot more high res than that.
They still look good even now! Though there is a bunch of new IPS displays you can install, these are semi-recent to the PSP handhelds, and while they lack saturation, they reaaaally make up for that in brightness!
…sadly only available (as things stand currently) for the 1000 and 3000 series though
You can see the OEM screen on top here, and the replacement IPS on the bottom:
I do miss the PSP. It was my “cellphone” as I had a talk only limited plan with my family. I would use it like the old Ipod, downloading music and videos to show my friends. I even downloaded fake Win7 to play on the browser. We would use Skype and talk over the internet since it was free.
I do miss spending all summer with my best friend Joe and my younger brother playing MPO(+) and Peace Walker, which we all sank 200+ hours into. We would then team up as a hunting party in MHFU, killing monsters over and over.
The demo and free game scene was great! I played tons of demos, discovering many solid titles: Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do to Deserve This? Pixlejunk Monsters, Patapon, LocoRoco. I didn’t even get to dive into the homebrew scene either.
To wrap up a school night, I would sure the internet with it (and then eventually connect it to the PS3 to game or surf the web since it was faster than the PSP browser) watching South Park.
Man, I miss handheld gaming (mobile gaming doesn’t count) and the Switch/2 doesn’t get that itch that the PSP and DS fixed.
For your use case steam deck or something similar would be a modern way to do what you did
I’ve been playing Puzzle Quest on my original PSP every so often and it’s really such a nice change of pace. No enshittification, subscriptions, forced updates, distractions…
I know it’s just a game system, but it feels like it’s helping repair my attention span and reminding me why I enjoyed technology a decade or two ago.
This is just an article I wrote some time ago, but seeing so much interest in Sony’s PSP lately, I thought it might fit in here well enough :)
Tried this on the auction site, got shafted on shipping ended up paying for disposal
Wow that’s terrible! What were they charging you? That’s one of the reasons why I recommend Mercari in that article above, the sellers pay for shipping on Mercari! You just pay the Buyee fee and international shipping.
I have a PSP-2000 sitting in the Mercari ‘warehouse’ right now, the cheapest international shipping for it is 1,050 YEN, the most expensive is 3,150 YEN. That’s from Japan to Australia, just for a comparison to what I see!
I had a five euro junk NAS look to cost 86 euro to ship to Ireland.
It was the international shipping that made it unreasonable.
I am also not uaed to their site layout so I may have been doing the wrong thing
