heya all! i've recently taken up an interest in trying this port because as of 2020 there is somehow no good homebrew for the PSP for playing media files. there is a built-in media player, but in all honesty it sucks pretty horribly. Rockbox however is pretty great software and seems like a great fit for the system!
currently: the system is broken wide open and you can launch programs from the main menu via the internal/external storage quite easily. since the console is fairly old now, Sony has no interest in patching the system. the current original firmware version is 6.61, and there are two main custom firmwares that work mostly similar but i'm not going to get into those here. the point is: the system can run any unsigned code easily and a bootloader is not needed or desired.
as far as i know, the PSP OS is single threaded non-multitasking. once a program has been handed off, it basically has full control of the system to do what it pleases.
as Darkpower_4 has stated, all models of the PSP have a 32-bit MIPS R4000 processor (single! not dual core) with a maximum clock of 333MHz, downclockable to 20MHz and plenty of steps in between.
the 1000 model has 32MB of RAM, while the 2000/3000/Go/E1000 and the development units have 64MB. all systems share 2MB of video RAM and a 480x272 display.
the DAC in all the hardware revisions is a Wolfson WM8973G. not sure what the DSP is yet, but i do have a data sheet for the WM8973L, which seems to be a similar chip.
controls consist of a 4-way d-pad, an analog joystick nub, a left and right bumper, a "home" key, two volume keys, a display key, a "media" key, a "start and "select" button, four face keys (cross, circle, square and triangle) and a combination power/hold switch. there is also technically two UMD switches for detecting whether the drive bay is open or not and whether a disc is inserted, but we don't really care too much about those :p
all models have removable Memory Stick storage (the largest official memory stick pro duo made is 64GB, it can likely accept larger cards through the use of micro SD adapters but i've never tried larger than 64GB), and the Go model also has an additional 16GB of onboard storage available to it.
on the Go model, both the memory stick and onboard storage are able to be accessed at the same time, which could be challenging for rockbox. i'm not sure how rockbox could handle two different storage areas, but PSP OS plugins can expose both as far as i know.
all models except the E1000 have 802.11b wifi, and the Go also has bluetooth 2.1. the 1000 model also has IrDA. the development units also have a few different serial connections an ethernet for debugging, plus a DVD drive.
to me, it sounds like possibly 3 different ports are needed for most consoles? one for the 1000 with 32MB RAM, one for the 2000/3000/E1000 and dev units with 64MB and possibly one for the Go with it's dual storage system and bluetooth. i currently have one 1000 unit and two 2000 units, but only the 1000 is currently available to me so that's the one i'm going to work on.
there's a wealth of information on
the playstation dev wiki that i'll be looking into. there's a homebrew SDK, and the system supports SDL.
Topic: PSP (Read 15345 times)
