Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

Picked up a new MIPS based handheld, has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, it's rather cool.

The manual has this interesting entry at the end (page 57)...

Copyright (C) 1988-1997 Sam Leffer
Copyright (C) 1991-1997 Silicon Graphics, Inc.

What brand is it?

Is it a PSP?

Those are probably copyrights for the TIFF library

indyman007 wrote: Is it a PSP?

Only PSP that has bluetooth is the PSP GO, which isnt out yet.

Gray Fox wrote:

indyman007 wrote: Is it a PSP?

Only PSP that has bluetooth is the PSP GO, which isnt out yet.

Actually, it came out today.

zmttoxics wrote:

Gray Fox wrote:

indyman007 wrote: Is it a PSP?

Only PSP that has bluetooth is the PSP GO, which isnt out yet.

Actually, it came out today.

Yea, I seen that. So umm na too lazy to edit my comment

Yeah, that's libtiff, our very favorite PSP and iPhone exploit vector!

There are a lot of other fun copyrights in the PSP manual - they threw a lot of open(and closed)-source libs in there.

Yes, a little PSP Go.

It doesn't do WPA2, but then neither does my Pismo with Airport.

It'll be interesting if they finally yield and provide a free dev kit like for the iPhone.

I have a Dingoo A320. 360mhz MIPS32+MDMX goodness. Open hardware based and tiny. Runs FLAC, Mp3, homebrew software, GNU/Larnicks, avi, mpeg, .mp4. Rocks my world for $80 worth of hardware. Get some! It has a full MMU unlike PSP. Awww. Also more mhz.

NetBSD port kthx?

uridium wrote: I have a Dingoo A320. 360mhz MIPS32+MDMX goodness. Open hardware based and tiny. Runs FLAC, Mp3, homebrew software, GNU/Larnicks, avi, mpeg, .mp4. Rocks my world for $80 worth of hardware. Get some! It has a full MMU unlike PSP. Awww. Also more mhz.

but does it have gran turismo?

sybrfreq wrote: but does it have gran turismo?

... and Crash Team Racing?

uridium wrote: It has a full MMU unlike PSP.

Sounds neat - I take your full MMU and raise you a rudimentary raster engine, a custom non-MDMX vector unit, a boatload of crypto hardware, and an entire extra CPU core though!
Quite a bit of the functionality of a full MMU could probably be emulated on the PSP - it has custom memory protection, so just add relocatable binaries (which Sony apps are by default)!

Honestly the Dingoo sounds a lot more useful, but goofing around with the PSP was a lot of fun.

Given that Sony have done their damnedest to crush the home brew games scene on PSP you might be waiting for a while to get an SDK! Apparently they haven't been having a good time persuading people to buy the PSP Go either.

Huh?

I thought Sony already announced they were going to make their development kits available for free for the PSP? I thought the PSP Go was selling quite well. Not that I particularly care, since I am not much of a gamer.

R-ten-K wrote: I thought Sony already announced they were going to make their development kits available for free for the PSP?.

They said they'd drop the price to 10% of what it was.

I think the problem they will have is you can write as much code as you want, you just can't load it or run it on the PSP.

porter wrote:

R-ten-K wrote: I thought Sony already announced they were going to make their development kits available for free for the PSP?.

They said they'd drop the price to 10% of what it was.

I think the problem they will have is you can write as much code as you want, you just can't load it or run it on the PSP.

I was a tad confused because there are already some homebrew kits for the PSP, I had no clue that it was impossible to load stuff onto them.

http://www.develop-online.net/news/3277 ... P-dev-kits

I hope the days of certain companies thinking that developing for their platforms should be treated as a privilege are numbered.

R-ten-K wrote: I hope the days of certain companies thinking that developing for their platforms should be treated as a privilege are numbered.

Sure didn't help one certain company we know of, did it ?

R-ten-K wrote: I was a tad confused because there are already some homebrew kits for the PSP, I had no clue that it was impossible to load stuff onto them.

http://www.develop-online.net/news/3277 ... P-dev-kits

I hope the days of certain companies thinking that developing for their platforms should be treated as a privilege are numbered.

There's been a homebrew kit for the PSP since it originally came out, at first you had to load the games by exploiting bugs in the v1.5 OS to trick it into running the unsigned applications. Sony then closed those bugs and tried to prevent the homebrew apps from running, but various groups have released custom OS ROMS for it that allow playing them. Sony's motive for closing this down is that the same hacks allow you to play illegally obtained software. That's why I have my doubts that they would ever release a truly open SDK, especially not for the PSP Go, which of course is download-only. Note that the article says they will "consider" releasing one "further down the line", which could just as easily mean "never".

Apple technically don't allow any old software on the iphone either, you have to publish via the app store or via a company share (for company internal apps). They do make an effort to block unlocks but it's fairly half-hearted compared to Sony who had some PSP OS updates solely for the purpose of blocking holes that allowed unlocks, and who made games require the latest version of the OS in order to force people to install the updates.

I have a PSP, which is unlocked so I can play my PS1 games - rather than having to wait for them to turn up on the Sony store to buy them again.

Every PSP released to-date can have unsigned, arbitrary user-mode code (can't access kernel RAM, crypto hardware, some privileged functions) executed, and we have 100% bare-metal access to the hardware (including the ability to do bringup(!)) on everything prior to the PSP-3000.
Sony have done their damnedest but just like every other console it's a cat-and-mouse game that the little guys usually win.

The PSP Go is a little more complex right now in that it involves a buffer overrun in a gamesave, and the code hasn't been publicly released yet. That should change soon.

Code is pretty fragmented around the homebrew community but pspdev is a good place to start if anyone wants to get into PSP development.

Real devkits are quite a bargin for a recent console, too, although with the PSP's lukewarm reception that's not too surprising.