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
The sheer amount of games you can run on that thing is absurd. Besides its own library, you can also run PSX games on it.
Then you get into hacking. Want to unlock it so that you can run homebrew stuff like emulators? Just copy a custom firmware (CFW) to your memory card, run it, and you’re done. If you want to lock it again, it’s just as easy. There isn’t any risk of bricking your PSP, because the CFW doesn’t make any permanent changes to your device!
So, now you can run emulators and play NES, Genesis, Gameboy, GBA, etc. There’s also a bunch of homebrew games, but they can be buggy and difficult to get running.
The fact that PSP has an untethered jailbreak that disappears on reboot is really awesome. I used a PSP 2000 for a lot of retro gaming about 10 years ago and it was great. When I first picked it up used, I was amazed at how light it was, because it felt much lighter than the 3DSXL that I’d been carrying around.
If you have one, I recommend getting a USB charger for it. It’s a dumb cable with a USB-A port on one side and a tiny barrel connector on the other. Makes it way easier to charge on the go.