New Toy...

Got a new toy from the girlfriend as a late birthday present. So far not too bad. I certainly found the packaging to be rather nice (not something I’d expected). Anyways, it wasn’t something I wanted so much for running emulators or stuff like that (which is what seems to be the most popular use for the system (along with it’s predecessor (the GP32) and the homebrew hacking on the PSP). Nor was it as a collector’s item to play the paltry amount of native games on it, nor use it as a poor man’s portable media player.

No I mainly bought it to do a little handheld tinkering and development. PSP homebrew is nice, but without official endorsement you always feel like you’re climbing through mud, uphill. I’m not really interested in emulators (I prefer the original hardware (MAME is the only real exception for me), nor do I feel like having to reverse engineer everything and then figure out why things break. Nor do I feel like bricking my PSP.

This really isn’t a slight against PSP homebrew (although it may seem as though it is). No, it’s really about having an environment you can play in. Having nice devtools (or just decent ones). Sure you don’t have a fancy CPU or GPU to mess with. But it’s no slouch. Besides, it’s mostly for prototyping little ideas for handhelds that I have that I can legitimately show off (Nintendo & Sony ususally aren’t too thrilled when you show up with an idea that’s running on their hacked systems (even if it is cool)).

On to the hardware. While it looks quite nice in pictures (and it’s not bad hardware either), when you hold it, it does feel a little cheap (it’s pretty light until you put the batteries in it). I think it’s mostly down to the type of plastics though and the controller nub. The screen is pretty nice though, although the menu/UI feels a bit on the “rough” side (sorta reminds me of my Modix HD-3510). Boot time is a little long and the UI navigation is a bit clunky to boot (no pun intended).

The video playback is a bit spotty. Depends on the video, but even within the supposed parameters, it still seems to drop frames. That’s usually a gripe I’ve had with DivX, XviD and the lot with hardware decoders. On a nice note, it does use AA batteries and comes with some rather nice 2500mAh AA batteries. Good thing too ’cause it’ll tear though alkalines as quickly as 10min depending on what you’re doing (e.g. having the CPUs clocked up to 240MHz+). Well that’s all for now… I’ll see what comes about after I start playing with the SDK.