Over the past few months, I've spotted something a little odd and unexpected happening to Sony's old PlayStation Portable. There's been no corporate push, no announcement of the truly portable Sony handheld we used to hope for (sorry, Portal). Instead, through something far less predictable, considering it's 2026, people are
  • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    Because they’re easily moddable and have a decent screen size?

    I recently modded my wife’s old 3DS XL, and that’s all well and good, but the screen sucks and I found out my MacBook can play 3DS games perfectly (via emulation) so now I’ve been dumping my carts through the 3DS (which also decrypts them) and just running them on the computer. Funny thing about Animal Crossing in particular, those games will generally ramp up to whatever hardware you have. Why they do this I have no idea since Nintendo hardware is so underpowered. But I have Animal Crossing New Leaf running in 4K (albeit in 4:3 or whatever the top screen was) and it looks almost as good as the Switch version (New Horizons). It’s insane how good this old 3DS game from 10-15 years ago looks today on modern hardware. The Switch couldn’t make New Leaf look this good if it wanted to. Maybe the Switch 2 could?

    Interested to see if I can push City Folk (the DS version) or Wild World (the Wii version) this far.

    But yeah, PSP is known to be an emulation beast. The problem was always the UMD drive, it drank battery like a frat guy drinks lite beer from a keg. But a modded PSP doesn’t need the UMD drive at all; it loads everything from the memory card. Including ISOs of UMD games. So the battery life goes way up, since the battery was intended to support the UMD drive.