I’ve already written plenty of posts about it and how significant it is for me, how a friend just gifted me his PSP on my 12th birthday and changed my life forever, and similar stories.

However, I knew about the PSP long before I got one, since a couple of friends or family members had them, giving me a chance to experience glimpses of its greatness. In this post, I decided to write down some of them, not just for your pleasure, but for my future self as well.

A short week with a PSP

I think the oldest memory I can recall about the PSP would be from one of my cousins. He is much older than me, and he had a PSP. It was either a 2000 or a 3000, I clearly remember he put it on one of those clear plastic cases, making the device a little harder to hold for my kid hands, that didn’t stop me though.

I remember he let me borrow it sometimes, and I would play some sort of Crash game—I think it was Crash: Mind over Mutant—having some fun with the platforming and not much else. I really have a hard time remembering this one, I don’t think it was a very good game, but kid me didn’t mind that much, I never bothered to revisit it, either way.

However, the other game my cousin had—or the other game he let me play—was, and still is, a gem of the PSP. It was Motorstorm: Arctic’s Edge. An absolutely exhilarating racing game that featured a huge variety of vehicles, incredible graphics, and a sense of velocity that I really, really liked.

I remember not even playing to win, I would just try to go as fast as possible and let myself jump from huge ramps, because the slow-motion and camera angle shifted to be more cinematic and I thought it was just super cool when I pulled off stunts, or to crash and get thrown around, even out of bounds, when playing as a biker.

All the vehicles looked super cool, like something out of Mad Max—I hadn’t watched Mad Max at that age—the soundtrack during races was rock and alternative music. It just was full of style and rule of cool. I played that game for hours during that vacation visiting family. I remember completing a bunch of tracks, and unlocking quite a few vehicles during that short week.

And then it was time to go back home and be bored again… I got over it soon enough, at least, and now I can play Arctic’s Edge on my PSP whenever I want! Although I prefer Ridge Racer nowadays.

A mind-blowing feature

I have a glimpse of a memory, where a friend of mine— or maybe a cousin—was playing one of the FIFA games on the PSP—I think it was FIFA 06 or 07. I did like soccer videogames back then, but I was never a huge fan, and I never got good at any of them, to be honest.

Either way, I didn’t get to play this time, I could only watch him run around and score goals, you know, what FIFA is known for.

What is cool about this, is that he connected the PSP to the TV, and instead of being bunched together around a tiny screen, we got to see the match in glorious CRT scanlined perfection. I can’t recall much about this event, where I was, or who I was with, but seeing the PSP be capable of external display output was just wild to me.

My first multiplayer experience

There’s this other time where my family and I got invited by some friends to have dinner. Their house was just so cool to me, one of those every kid wishes to live in—and adult gamers too, to be honest—The kids there, who were maybe 2 or 3 years older than me, had a Wii! I had plenty of fun playing Mario Kart Wii, I really liked that one track with a section where you jump around in mushrooms. It’s still around on MK8 Deluxe!

But most importantly, they had not one, but two PSPs. Because of that, I was able to experience local multiplayer games, portably!

This is something that was possible already on Nintendo handhelds since the original Game Boy, the Advance and of course, the DS, which was all the rage at the time. But I hadn’t been anywhere where two of those would connect to play.

What multiplayer title did I play? Killzone Liberation.

What even is that? would be a fair question. First, I didn’t know about Monster Hunter yet, so I had no idea of what I was missing out on the multiplayer department. Second, Killzone Liberation is actually rather good! The original title for PS2 was an FPS, however—unlike most titles that tried and failed to adapt FPS controls to a handheld without dual sticks—Liberation went for an isometric top-down perspective, where walking and aiming is all done by the same stick, and the rest of the controls are designed around it, making the gameplay actually kind of great, once you get used to it.

We played some multiplayer on both PSPs and it was super fun. I think I never got to win a round, but throwing around grenades above walls and covers, and trying to hide from danger was fun enough to me. Simply seeing the soldiers moving around and thinking “the other kid is controlling it from his PSP” was kind of mind-blowing to me.

I don’t know if I played something else that day, but I clearly remember this being my first local multiplayer handheld experience, and it was great.

A couple of “impossible” ports

Before getting the PSP gifted to me, that friend let me play it from time to time, or sometimes I just watched him doing so. He didn’t own that many physical games, and with a Memory Stick of just 4 GB of storage, he didn’t really have many ISOs downloaded either.

However, he had Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories, one of those cool games that were just absolutely mind-blowing to me. Something that looked and played like GTA: San Andreas—a game that was everywhere on arcade machines with Xbox controllers attached to them¹. Something like that running on a tiny little handheld like the PSP and being actually fun, featuring voice acting, good animation and a lot of mayhem and destruction thanks to cheat codes. It’s amazing that it ran at all.

And then there was Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. I think this was probably the game that solidified my love for Star Wars as a franchise. It was simply fantastic and bombastic and full of very cool moments, I only saw glimpses of it but I was obsessed. Years later, when the PSP was finally mine, I played it again and fell for it completely, I even read the novelization because it was just such a cool piece of lore for me—later ruined by Disney a year or so later but anyway. To this day, it’s the only Star Wars novel I’ve read and I wouldn’t have done so without the PSP game.

Well, that was another nice trip down memory lane! I guess I’ve been way too inspired by Marisabel’s Blaugust theme of Nostalgia. Can’t be helped. 🤷‍♂️

In any case, the PSP is as great a handheld today as it was in 2012, so if you have one laying around somewhere, make sure to give it a go! You can do a lot of stuff with it still. Like, play music, emulate games from the GBA and SNES and of course backups of your own games. Just mod it already, it only takes like two minutes…

So yeah, the PSP is back!

This all started because Brendon and Stephen from the Into The Aether podcast, announced that they are making a PSP premiere episode this season, which means they’ll play a bunch of games for the PSP and talk about it for I hope 5 or more hours straight.

Of course, I am, and have always been, a PSP sicko.

I already mentioned this multiple times in previous weeknotes but I felt like talking about it on its own post, that’s how excited I am to just have my favorite podcast highlight one of, if not the most significant gaming device of my life.

All of these things also made me return to my journey playing Final Fantasy IV The Complete Collection, and to dip my feet once again into the Ys franchise with Ys: The Oath of Felghana. Both have provided me with a lot of fun as well, as mentioned before.

I am even considering to purchase some physical UMDs, because why not? But I don’t actually want to do that right now, I am yet to purchase a physical game this year, keeping with the commitment I started last year!

Regardless, it is a little ironic, to come back to the PSP over my current emulation handheld, the Anbernic SP—where I’m playing games like Drill Dozer or Fire Emblem—or my Nintendo Switch—where I have done a lot of progress lately with Dragon Quest XI and Hollow Knight.

The PSP should not feel as good as it does when compared to the nice things of modern software and hardware, and yet, it does. The XMB interface remains absolutely gorgeous, and the hardware itself is still really nice!

The only real issue is the buttons for me, only because I replaced the originals after they broke when I shell-swapped my device, and the 3rd party ones are still quite stiff, my thumb gets actually tired of pressing them sometimes, not a good thing when spamming sword attacks in Oath of Felghana. But I’m still playing!

What else can I say? the hype got to me, and the hobby cycle never stops going.

This is day 10 of #100DaysToOffload

I had a few PS1 games on EBOOT.PBP format on my PSP, which have worked quite well so far, but the savefile format only works on the PSP itself and nothing more.

Since my move to the Miyoo Mini Plus, and me deciding to switch my PS1 gaming to it from the time being, I had to figure out how to transfer those savefiles over.

First off: figuring out which savefile is which.

The easiest way to know what save corresponds to what game is to open the game in you PSP, save, exit and then connect the device to a computer and sort by date.

The next best way is to look for your game in the PSX Data Center using Ctrl+F (there are lists for games in PAL and Japanese regions which can be seen there as well) and then finding the corresponding code.

The PSP has its savefiles located in the path PSP/SAVEDATA/ and it probably contains a bunch of folders with titles like this SLES01734 or SLUS00585, the file that has a matching code will be the one.

Opening the folder you will find a PNG file, usually of the game cover art, which will confirm it is the game we want.

Finally, you can use the online website Save File Converter to convert your saves from the PSP’s .VMP to proper PS1 save files in the .mcr format.

Note that The Miyoo Mini Plus will not recognize this filename extension, however it is as simple as renaming the filename extension to .srm instead.

Now, the format of the ROM file itself is a different story.

PSP runs EBOOT.PBP files, you can use these files in the Miyoo Mini Plus, just copy paste it to the proper location and change the name to Game_Name.pbp. Note that if the file comes with some KEYS.BIN and other extra files, it will probably not work in the MM+, but I haven’t looked into how to fix that.

The Miyoo Mini Plus supports .chd and the regular .cue and .bin roms. The .chd format is the smallest in size and the compression is lossless, so I see no reason not to use it. The easiest way would be to source it directly in that file format, but you can also convert .cue/.bin files by using the chdman command line tool. This is located in the mame package in Void Linux, it is a standalone program in Arch as well.

Run this command and you are good to go:

chdman createcd -i "Resident Evil 3 - Nemesis (USA).cue"  -o "Resident Evil 3 - Nemesis (USA).chd"

If you install parallel you can do batch conversion of files, with this line:

parallel chdman createcd -i {} -o {.}.chd ::: *.cue

Which will convert all the .cuefiles in the working directory to .chd.

Feel free to check the official documentation for more information about running PS1 games on Onion OS.

This is day 44 of #100DaysToOffload and post 12 of #WeblogPoMo2024

However I’ve also watched videos of other handhelds from Retroid, Anbernic and other similar brands and clones and I have to say I’m discovering a whole new world I’m not sure I want to get into it any more than the Mini Plus.

I already own a PSP as many of you might say, and I am perfectly aware that it can pretty much run everything the Miyoo can. I literally completed Chrono Trigger on it, and I played like 40 hours of Final Fantasy VI on it as well. Not to mention the hundreds of hours put into Monster Hunter Freedom Unite and other RPGs, GTAs and similar stuff.

Despite this, I can’t help but be extremely excited, specifically about SNES and GBA emulation, since I was always able to tell the music of many games slowed down quite a lot unless frameskip was enabled, which would make some things jittery.

Another part of me feels like the speaker may not even be that good, according to some reviews, but I’m even buying some wired earphones just to counteract that in case I can’t handle it.

There’s another weird feeling of going back to playing some of the Pokemon titles on the GBA. Pokemon Fire Red and Emerald were one of the first games I emulated on my HTC ChaCha with physical keys—alongside a couple Zeldas and Metroid—and I also played them for quite a bit of time on my PSP when I got it. I guess I want to relive those childhood memories once again.

And then theres the possibility of DS emulation! I am perfectly aware that one would probably be best on a device with a touchscreen, but it is still great to have, especially for the games that don’t really make use of the dual screen. I may replay Chrono Trigger’s DS version once I get it, as well as the Pokemon games for it!

Then there’s the Pico-8 support, and the ports of multiple games and software that is just, so great! So many things await!

I can’t wait to have this device and play around with it, and maybe buy some other handhelds down the road, I’ve heard rumors of a clamshell design coming soon, I might not manage to control myself—what rabbit hole did I get myself into?

This is day 37 of #100DaysToOffload and post 4 for #WeblogPoMo2024

• @Doctor_Derp asks: Do you like waffles/pancakes/french toast?

  Yes, I like them all, I eat them all, I enjoy them all, good food.

• Konstantin asks: what’s your favorite kind of coffee?

  I think it would be American coffee? It’s just coffee with a couple spoons of sugar and fresh milk. Café con leche!

  I also like Café de Olla.

• Clayton asks: What was your first computer and what lead you to love technology and FOSS?

  This is a hard one, I remember playing with my father’s laptops a few times, there was this cereal box motorcycle racing game that I found quite fun. I think I still have it.

  My first desktop was some sort of HP thing with 512 MB of RAM, running Windows XP and quite a bit of very slow hard drive storage. I remember trying a CD of FIFA 07 for PC and it ran pretty well. I didn’t really care about FOSS until 2016 or so, when I discovered F-Droid and custom ROMs, but still, it was more because of the free as in gratis, I didn’t care much about the freedom for another couple years when I started to care about game development, discovered Godot, then Linux, and the rest is history. I may go into more detail in a biggee post.

• Rogue asks: Any rare games you’ve been wanting to find and play on your PSP?

  I don’t really have anything I can’t find 😉 … But there are some games I’ve been meaning to play. One of those games is Riviera: The Promised Land, it sounds neat, and it is a JRPG, I don’t know what else to say.

• Hyde asks: What do you think of those youtubers that do some boxing?

  I don’t know who does that, not really following that side of YouTube, but the few times I’ve heard about that I found out there’s also Chess-Boxing where you do a round of boxing and another of chess, and I think that sounds kind of fun.

• Benjamin Hollon asks: If you could do anything full-time without having to worry about money or other factors, what would that dream job be?

  Traveling is probably the answer—not really a dream job though.

  Honestly I would probably like to do game development, I really enjoyed it during the pandemic and it was fun, I would use some of my infinite money to get a powerful desktop and some instruments to make my soundtracks and learn more about everything. I liked making games. Maybe even be in charge of just directing it, having a full team of well paid people to help me achieve my vision—I don’t know that vision yet, though.

• 82Mhz asks: What brought you to blogging and having a website in the first place?

  I kind of answered this question already! In my previous blogpost. In short, I found out about the fediverse, about the small web community and Linux, and I decided to start blogging once I discovered Kev Quirk’s 100 Days To Offload challenge.

• CactoChameleon9 asks: Do you have any interesting short term or long term ambitions?

  I just want to have a job that allows me to have 2 free days and where I just have to be in front of a computer doing whatever I’m asked to do, I want to have enough time to keep blogging, doing my hobbies and discovering new ones. I would like to code or expand on one of the videogames I’ve developed, as a solo project of mine, and earn some money that way too—it would still be FOSS though.

  I would like to have a family, have kids, teach them everything I know as soon as possible, specially origami! They would be bilingual, solve rubiks cubes, do yo-yo tricks and be the coolest kids at school, But I also want to be able to accept their choices in life—unless that choice involves not doing origami. 😤

• Wouter asks: Why isn’t your top 25 GOAT list on your blog, and why don’t you talk a little bit about each entry?

  Oh yeah, that was going to be a future blog! I kind of did it on a whim, I will expand on my choices later and think this through more in depth, it should be fun! I meant to do it but I kinda forgot, so thanks to the reminder… proceeds to forget again.

For now these are all the answers for the questions I could find, if you have anymore questions feel free to leave them somewhere! This was really fun, actually—let’s do it again!

This is post 74 of #100DaysToOffload. Have a good rest of your day, fellow reader. 😊

Right now I am playing a couple different games at once, some of them I’ll try and get as much juice out ot them, a few others I’ll just follow the main plot.

Metroid Dread

Originally, I was only going to write about Metroid Dread, because it is the game I’ve been playing the most. I have already almost completed the entire plot except for the final boss, and since the game is pretty short, I decided to get every single item available first.

Metroid has always been somewhat of the perfect series for completionists, the game is focused on exploration, and it has a ton of replay value, ever since the first title, the game keeps track of the time it takes you to complete it, as well as the percentage of items you’ve obtained.

However, older titles in the series lack a built-in way to keep track of your progress until the very end of the game credits. Call me lazy but I don’t wanna look up maps online to know I’ve discovered all areas and items.

Metroid Dread actually displays the percentage of items per-area, and it also blinks on areas that may have a hidden secret on them. Despite that, it still has some zones that don’t show on the map or places that I have no idea how you were supposed to discover if it wasn’t for any guide. The problem however is almost non-existent, and other than a couple puzzles I had to look up, I’ve been able to find most of the items and I already 100% everything but 2 areas. Besides most of the puzzles are a matter of skill rather than discovery, which is quite neat.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild

This game is a masterpiece, I started playing it pretty much as soon as I got my Nintendo Switch, I have defeated one of the beasts and just got to the second one. However I have completed a bunch of shrines already. I honestly don’t want to complete this game, therefore I am in a bit of a hiatus until I complete Dread and get back to it, its actually been a while since I’ve played it, around a month maybe, so the time is near.

Maybe I’ll also try to 100% it just so I can enjoy it before I get into Tears of The Kingdom, since I’ve heard that game makes its predecessor feel like an alpha. We’ll see!

Final Fantasy IV

This is a game I actually started like a year ago. I am very prone to playing games halfway through, and even around 90% of them, only to not continue playing it for one reason or another. This is the case of FFIV, I got too confused on a dungeon with too many floors, and I decided to just leave.

I finally continued it recently and I am having a great time. The PSP version has great quality of life features, and while I won’t fully complete it I think I’ll be able to finish the main story soon enough.

Burnout Legends

The thing about games like this one is that there really is not much to do other than just race. The game however actually has a progress indicator, so I may consider completing it. Its not really that deep since its just a racing game with nice physics and gameplay.

Honorable mentions

There are other games were I haven’t really put much thought into them. Mario & Luigi Super Star Saga would have a full section but since I lost the progress on it, I can’t really say much.

Another game were I recently made some progress is Suikoden II, it is also a JRPG, feels like what Final Fantasy would look like if it had stayed with 2D graphics, the animations and gameplay is buttery smooth and it has a really enjoyable interface, its been a while since I’ve faced a boss though and I mainly progressed through the story at the moment, a bunch of drama and political intrigue will be found on this game.

I’ve also done a bit of progress on The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, but I am focusing more on FFIV. Once I’m done it will be next on my PSP games list.

Oh! Final Fantasy VII is a thing too! I don’t know why I play so many JRPGs at once, I am probably doing a disservice to them by playing like this, but its also quite alright, since I kinda manage to get into them and switch pretty quickly. Maybe its because all of them are gems or maybe I am some kind of genius who can keep track of multiple plotlines.

Anyway, this is enough writing for today, this was day 59 of #100DaysToOffload

As always, my hobbies come in waves, and this is no exception. I recently had added a bunch of new roms and isos to my psp, and I had also started to back them up in my Raspberry Pi server. I was doing this in many ways, via the user interface, using a file manager and also via the good old terminal, which proved to be the best, as expected.

Maybe three weeks ago, I decided to do a full backup of my PSP folder, since I didn’t trust my microSD card enough. The folder contains pretty much everything important to me: savedata, homebrew files, emulators, and of course, games. I backed everything up to my server using rsync without any problem.

Recently I wanted to do some cleaning up of unused games and launchers I had made, and I decided to delete some folders. You see, using the game categories plugin for my PSP lets me create, well, categories, that show up in my PSP game list. Since all of my categories have the CAT_ prefix, I pretty much just did rm -rf CAT_ and used Tab… The terminal is too powerful for me sometimes…

I ended up deleting my Emulators folder, which contained the emulators I listed on my what’s on my psp post, as well as all my games, my save files and config.

So, if it wasn’t because my past self decided to create a backup out of this, I would be emotionally in shackles.

I did lose some hours of Metroid Zero Mission, Mario and Luigi Super Star Saga and also some recently added romhacks like A Link To The Past Redux and EarthBound Redux. Thankfully, it really wasn’t that bad, in the end it was only a couple bossfights and some upgrades that got lost.

I am so glad I didn’t delete my PSP’s SAVEDATA folder though, now that would make me cry.

Do your backups people.

This is day 58 of #100DaysToOffload

• Games
  • PSP Games
  • PS1 Games
  • Homebrew Games
• Emulators
• Homebrew Tools
• Plugins
• Conclusion

Games

There is a huge library of games native for the PSP, and I’ve played quite a lot of them. From original, exclusive titles, to ports identical to home consoles such as the PS2 and PS3. And of course, native support for a ton of PS1 games, with official releases and the option to port title to the console, with varying degrees of success. Here are some of the games I have.

PSP Games

The PSP uses the .iso format on his games, that usually come packaged into UMDs, this little disk is the storage medium chosen by Sony for his handheld, and it kinda sucks. Thankfully, once you mod a PSP, it is very easy to extract your ISO files, and they are also easy to come across if you sail the seven seas, I very much implore you to avoid doing that since Sony may get poor and run out of money to produce high quality products like the Play Station Portal, you know?

Anyway, I got my games on a microSD card, thanks to a memory stick adaptor, very cheap and easy to get, I can’t say I’ve played every single one of them, I recently removed quite a bit of games I had completed already, such as Ys Seven, Jeanne D’Arc and a few I can’t remember, here is a list with the ones currently in my device:

• Burnout Legends: A fantastic racing arcade game with a bunch of destruction and fun courses. A few of the mods are kinda boring (I am looking at you Pursuit), but I’ve played a bunch of this game lately, I don’t have to think, just seek and destroy.
• Lumines: This is the game that exists when you try to make Tetris while you avoid making Tetris, add a fantastic soundtrack that keeps you in the zone and this is fantastic. Really fun to lose time.
• Metal Slug Anthology: Its Metal Slug, what else do you want? I have to be honest I haven’t gotten too far but it’s always fun.
• Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G FUC: This is a patched version of the japanese version of Freedom Unite, with English translation and some extra mission and nice quality of life improvements.
• Monster Hunter Portable 3rd (English Patched v5): This game never came out of Japan, so the english patch is all we got, it’s not 100% but it’s perfectly playable if you’ve played other games in the series.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky: The JRPG series I want to get into one of these days, it’s fantastic so far, but a little difficult. The grind is real but it is how it is.

PS1 Games

When it comes to PS1 games things change a little, most of them are JRPGs or Resident Evil, channels like The Sphere Hunter and others got me into a Resident Evil craze, and I came across Parasite Eve in 2018, even read the novel. Regardless, I still haven’t finished any of them, despite the amount of media I’ve consumed about them. Here’s the list:

• Final Fantasy VII: No need for an explanation. This is considered one of the greates game on the console, while its successors improve on their graphics, the story and nostalgia factor of this one is strong, even though I never had a PS1 growing up.
• Klonoa: Door to Phantomile: A platformer that many consider better than Crash Bandicoot, it is really fun and has some fantastci 3D mechanics that I imagine were great for its time. Enjoyable, still need to play it more.
• Metal Gear Solid: Great game, clearly. I am stuck with Psycho Mantis, but it’s because I am lazy to keep trying… It’s been like that for 4 years…
• Parasite Eve: This game looks and plays great, other than the slow movement speed. A unique setting and fantastic cinematics and artwork. If only I could get out of the Hospital area please…
• Resident Evil 3: This game is genuinely scary to me, I don’t know why I started with 3, but it’s quite a challenge. I have to come back to it.
• Suikoden II: I have almost as much progress as FFVII on this one, a very fun 2D pixelart jrpg that has not aged at all, looks and plays fantastic.
• Xenogears: This one is also great, but I still have to do progress on it, plays great and the art is awesome,it kinda looks like Octopath Traveler with its 3D environments and 2D character design.

Homebrew Games

• Cave Story: Before Celeste, before Shovel Knight, before the indie game scene was a thing people cared about, there was Cave Story. This game is really fun, and it has been ported everywhere, you should play it now, it’s even available in many Linux repositories, and the PSP version rules too.
• Celeste: Speaking of Celeste, the Pico-8 version that precedes the game everyone loves, has been ported to the PSP too and it works just as you would expect it to. A fun challenge.
• DDLC-LOVE: This is a port of Doki Doki Literature Club, a visual novel everyone needs to play at some point, don’t let its looks deceive you, there is a lot more. The port is kinda hard to play due to the small screen but I have it because it’s cool.
• Doom: Yes, it runs Doom.
• Tyrian: A space shooter (not in space) that has also been ported everywhere since it has a FOSS version (OpenTyrian), it’s quite fun and challenging.
• Minecraft: Some random clone of Minecraft, I don’t remember exactly which version I got but it’s pretty nice, just surf the net a bit and you will find many versions.
• Super Mario 64: This is a source port of the game, and it runs pretty decently! A bit laggy sometimes, but what else do you want?
• Powder: Powder is a roguelike, I haven’t played it but I got it because I wanted to.
• Tome 2.3.5: Tales of Middle Earth, I haven’t played it but it seems to be some sort of text based adventure, please if you have played it tell me what’s up.

Emulators

I found a pretty complete list of emulators you can check here. I don’t play every single system so here are the ones I have installed myself:

• MasterBoy 2.02: This is an emulator for the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Gear and Master System, quite a powerful emulator with a fantastic interface, it works pretty well.
• NesterJ AoEX: For the NES, works pretty nicely, since the PSP is plenty powerful, I got a couple of homebrew games too.
• s9xTYLme Mod: There are a ton of weird versions floating around on the net, the amount of forks and mods done for this emulator is kinda annoying, there is a whole story out there regarding the original dev and the times his work got stolen by others and claimed as their own. The culture in the homebrew scene at the time seems to be a shaky one, and this emulator is where it shows the most.
• UO gpSP kai: An Emulator for the Game Boy Advance. It runs fantastic when the PSP is overclocked, I have played to completion multiple games here, such as Minish Cap and both Metroid entries for this console, works wonderfully.

Homebrew Tools

• PSPFILER: A file manager for the PSP
• FusaGamePad: Use your PSP as a gamepad for your PC or any supported device.
• hbsorter: When you have so many games you sometimes want to sort them, this tool does it. Your categories need to start with “CAT_” if you want this to work with that plugin.
• psp-ftpd: An FTP server for the PSP. You have to have an open hotspot from your phone or laptop since most Wi-Fi routers don’t support old WPA or WEP security protocols the PSP knows.
• pspkvm: Execute JAVA programs from your PSP! A lot of java games can be played now too!

Plugins

• Game Categories: A fantastic way to organize a big game library, I personally have a category for PSP, PSX, Homebrew Games, Homebrew Apps and Emulators.
• Quickboot: This tool lets me start a game while playing something else. This is great, since exiting a game and opening another one the normal way is so much slower.
• PSPStates: Save states for PSP games, doesn’t work in some titles and doesn’t work on PS1 titles, but when it works, it does so wonderfully.
• Joysens: I used to have a joystick with drift, this plugin allowed me to configure the sensitivity and deadzone of it, right now I don’t use it but it can come handy in the future if you can’t afford a physical replacement.

Conclusion

This took me a lot longer than I expected, I feel like I could have done a single article for many of the things I wrote today. Regardless, I am happy I finally did it. Its been fun to write something again, even if it took me a while to get back into it.

This is day 54 of #100DaysToOffload

Until a few months later, I got my PSP fixed, and remembered I could use it as a game controller, but until now, I decided to join Monster Hunter and play online again, properly, this time.

In case you don’t know what Monster Hunter is, the best way to describe it would be:

Get stick, hunt monster, improve stick with monster parts.

Rinse and repeat.

There are a lot of nice features and gameplay around this gameplay loop, of course, which has only gotten better in the later generations, if a bit bloated for some of the oldest player base. Of course I’ve never actually experienced a lot of the new stuff, but watching gameplay I sometimes can’t even tell what’s happening, which is not a great sign for me, of course if you want to get me a copy of the newer games on Steam or whatever I will not refuse. 😉

Let’s say that this month’s Monthly Summary will be pretty different from previous months…

Since last time I played, I switched my Linux distro a couple of times, so, like before I had to set up Hunsterverse to play online with the PPSSPP emulator and such (just follow the link to know more), using OpenVPN.

However, I also discovered that Zerotier (and Tailscale) can be used for this, which is kinda obvious now that I have learned more about how networks work since I started hosting my own server. With this method, I joined the Madness Gaming Network and its been more than enough to play with some players I met there.

My experience has been great, I’ve been playing quite often and enjoying my time hunting monsters and grinding to get that one item drop I need to get that sweet new armor and such. I even got an IRL friend of mine to try it out and now we’ve played together quite a few times and its been a blast. It will still be a while for him to learn the Way of the Hunter, but its been good so far on Portable 3rd, can’t wait to introduce him to Freedom Unite!

Also, for some reason I had forgotten that Monster Hunter has a nice social feature buil-in! Guild Cards! One of the hunters I played with sent me his, and I realized that I have access to quite a list of hunters I used to play with back in 2017, and I was able to check the hunts we participated together on, the armor set he was using since last time we played and many other awesome statistics that are just nice to have, surviving since so long ago.

I even finally catched up with a player from those days, I had suspicions on his username immediately, and as soon as I sent him my GC, the game told me “You already sent your Guild Card to this player” and almost at the same time, we messaged each other on Discord and had an incredibly nostalgic flow of memories talking about the good old days.

I edited my Guild Card message to display my website too, so I may have a couple new readers soon enough…

Its been a while since my last post, but let’s pretend that didn’t happen. I pretty much played the entire time rather than blogging, oops.

Please, join me, I can help you get into this. Seriously, I don’t mind I just wanna be happy and hunt big monsters with sticks.

This is day 44 of #100DaysToOffload

Finally, I am able to play the PSP library again, as well as keep playing via emulators as I had done during the previous years.

I went ahead and gave a try to one of the God of War games, and I gotta say it still looks really, really awesome. Its obviously nothing close to how the latest game looks like, but the fluidity and the gameplay is top notch console quality.

Also, the SD card I had used with my Raspberry Pi got swapped with another one that had less storage, since I didn’t have a need for a bigger one due to using an HDD to store everything.

So now I have a PSP with 64GB of storage and a big library at my disposal. I really missed playing games with the analog stick. I know its not the best stick ever designed, but I have nostalgia for it! Even if playing Monster Hunter will kill my thumb once again, I am here for it.

My psp is quite beat up at this point due to the use, I am also considering to get a new shell for it, but I am not into repairing and modding stuff myself, any advice on that would be appreciated!

This wasn’t that big of a blog to be honest, so that’s pretty much it today.

The website that hosts it is still up and running, despite showing a bit of age, you should be able to download it from there.

I discovered this homebrew a few years ago, back when I was playing Monster Hunter Freedom Unite online making use of the now dead EvolveHQ service (A VPN of sorts) and also Hunsterverse, but I had no use for it up until recently.

I was trying my best trying to defeat a boss in Hollow Knight, which I recently acquired, and found myself unable to move quickly enough. I know I am better using a controller, so I went ahead and used this, and, while I knew it worked fine on Windows, I was quite happy to see that it also works perfectly fine on Steam.

I tried it in other games with mixed results, so I guess I’ll have to figure out some more stuff, or maybe just switch to a distro more focused on gaming, I feel more and more tempted by the day, but I want to stay on Void for a little longer.

Anyways, this post is just a quick write up on a fantastic tool I think more people should know, I think I should talk about some other PSP homebrew, sadly, a lot of it is not open source and probably abandonware, since the PSP hacking scene died a while ago.

I think, however that there are still quite a few things being developed for the PSP, besides the already huge library of games and emulators, I think even stuff like Doki Doki Literature Club have been ported to it, and you can also setup a Minecraft server on it!.

So yeah, the PSP is not only a great emulation gaming machine, its also a pretty decent PC controller, at least when certain games properly support it, or maybe its Flatpak being weird, or some other random setting, who knows?.

This has been day 77 of #100DaysToOffload

As time goes on, a lot of other games were also played, but ended up losing interest in them, and never got completed, sometimes because the games were boring, others because I got mad at them.

I recently acquired a couple of PC games that I am enjoying so far, Hollow Knight is quite amazing and challenging, and I am enjoying it quite a bit. Axiom Verge too is going just fine CrossCode remains unplayed because of graphical glitches that I have been unable to solve, but maybe it fixes itself at some point.

Among the games I really hate that I haven’t been able to finish, there is Final Fantasy VI. You’ll see, there is this tower, which is the only thing between me and the final dungeon, and you are only able to use magic, and there is this one move that can kill your whole party, so you have to use this Lazarus move that revives you after dying, and I just was not able to go down the tower and grind with normal enemies to get it, so I just got stuck there. I think I could have won with enough effort, but I lost my save file and I got kinda mad. I might start the game all over again some time soon, but yeah, it really infuriated me.

Another game I haven’t been able to finish despite being basically at the end is Ys Seven, which is an action RPG, pretty epic and fast paced, the last boss (probably? I think there might be another one after it, but I haven’t seen any spoilers) has three phases where I use 3 different parties of characters, I just lose all of my equipment, potions and such, so I think I still have to grind a lot to be able to get it done. Good thing is the game has a decent teleportation system so I think it shouldn’t be that hard.

Yet another game that is stuck in time, is Parasite Eve. This game rocks, I love the battle system, the graphics and everything about it, but I think I mixed the wrong weapons or something, I am stuck at a hospital where I just can’t survive long enough to defeat all the enemies, I run out of mana and health too quickly, I wish I was able to avoid attacks, which is not that hard, I’m just dumb.

Jeanne D’Arc is another game where I got to the final boss (probably) and I think I just went underleveled, the thing is, the game is a tactics game, which means, each playthrough is super long and it takes a while to finish a match. Thankfully, leveling up is not actually that difficult, I just have to get the time and willingness to do so.

The latest game I started that I haven’t gotten around to completing or even playing consistently is Final Fantasy VII, I just can’t really stand the random encounters and the weird controls of each minigame, thankfully I have won most of them in the first try, and the actual battles are really enjoyable, if a bit long because of animations.

However, the one game I really want to finish but I lost the save file alongside FFVI is Terranigma, if you have not played that SNES game, it is one of the better action RPG games I’ve seen, the gameplay is amazing, you can do combos and different kinds of attacks, the dungeons are quite clever and the bosses are also really fun, it’s basically The Legend of Zelda, but harder, better, faster and stronger, at least by SNES standards, it’s not just a simple clone, the story I was able to experience was great, I hope I get the time to finish it soon.

There are a lot of other games I have started, but I have not gone that far on any of them to feel guilty about not completing them, or I am still playing them, just taking it slow. Stuff such as Resident Evil 2 and 3, Xenogears, Cave Story, Suikoden II, Metal Gear Solid, MGS: Peace Walker and others.

I didn’t play some of these because the joystick on my PSP was faulty, but I recently got it fixed, so I can now continue playing them just fine.

Anyways, not a lot of structure this time, but I wanted to have something today, a bit late, but anyways.

This has been day 76 of #100DaysToOffload

You’ll see, I am not in a position where I can acquire a lot of games and spend money on consoles or even a decent computer, so, when a friend gifted a PSP to me on my birthday back in 2012. I was really, really happy. It was my second console, since I already had a Gameboy Advance SP where I only had a couple decent games, and a pretty low chance of getting more.

One PSP game that affected me quite a lot was Monster Hunter Freedom Unite. I played it for hundreds of hours, and I really enjoyed it. However, my joystick stopped working properly, and I was unable to play it on my PSP. That unfortunate event, opened the way to a world of older games and emulators that didn’t required an analog stick, a topic that I will explore in later blogs.

Back to today’s topic, I discovered that I could not only play Monster Hunter again, thanks to PPSSPP, but also enjoy hunting online for the first time, thanks to a platform known as Evolve HQ. This tool allowed the creation of parties and chatrooms where I could interact with other hunters and help each other out. All I had to do was start my copy of the game using the PPSSPP emulator and configure the networking settings to the one provided by Evolve, visible in the GUI. Back then I was playing on Windows using a cheap Xbox-styled controller.

However, by the end of 2018, Evolve HQ closed its servers (archive), and I stopped playing for a while. Before that, I was already looking for different ways to play, and I found out about the HunsterVerse, a P2P (player 2 player) network that is used to play different PSP games online, mainly the Monster Hunter franchise. So after Evolve HQ died, I moved there for a few weeks until, for school reasons, I had to leave the game again, with a few hunts sparsed here and there.

Until now.

During the whole pandemic, it never once crossed my head the idea to spent some time playing there. I wouldn’t want it any other way though, since I learned a lot about other things such as Linux and Game development, which one could argue are better ways to spend the time instead of infinitely grinding trying to get the part I need to complete my armor set.

Anyways, I had been cleaning up my emails the last couple days, and while doing that I found the email I received when signing up for the HunsterVerse, it contained my OpenVPN profile, which is the tool used by the HunsterVerse network. And I told myself “Why not give it a try?”, I installed OpenVPN from F-Droid, imported the file and copy pasted my game and savedata to my android device, and voila!, back at it again!

Just kidding, after 2017, the profile certificate had to be fixed with some new changes, and I had downloaded the previous one, so I checked my email again and found a more recent email that contained the new configuration, since I had asked for it back in 2019 for some quick hunts I did that year.

I downloaded the file, forwarded the emails to a more email address and got to play! I just re-installed OpenVPN (The F-Droid version didn’t work for some reason, so Play Store had to be open) and joined a quick match with my small account, unaware of the new enemy I had to face.

I was barely able to move, I was so used to playing using my controller, that using touch controls on my phone was painful. I am aware that some players deal with that and have set their own layouts and custom buttons.

Despite that, I decided to join a room and set up a quick low ranked mission. I didn’t even had to ask, and a group of hunters joined and after getting ready, we parted to hunt a Velocidrome, one of the easiest monsters in the game.

The camera controls have always been known for needing a “claw” grip that would kill your hand over time. I was pretty used to it, but the lack of a tactile feel made it even harder, along with accidental touches, and a lack of vision due to my fingers being all over the screen, made it so my teammates had already killed the monster in 4 minutes, and I didn’t even manage to find the corpse to carve some goodies.

Anyways, it was a fun first hunt after a couple years without playing, and since Summer vacations are coming up soon, I am planning to get myself a controller to properly play this game and enjoy it like the good old times.

If you didn’t know about the HunsterVerse, I really recommend joining its Discord server, even if you don’t play those old games online, they also have chatrooms for the newer games, such as Monster Hunter Rise that came out this year.

This has been day 41 of #100DaystoOffload