Retro

I have a confession to make. I’ve never played through such classics as Super Mario World, Earthbound, Super Metroid, Super Mario RPG, A Link to the Past, or ANY Final Fantasy. You can pretty much add any 8-bit or 16-bit games to that list as well.

Now, it’s not all my fault. My parents refused to buy me videogames of any sort, so the first console I actually owned as a pawn shop purchased PSX sometime in late highschool. My early forays into gaming were limited to hand-me-downs from my uncle, things like Dark Forces, Steel Panthers, and Wolfenstein.

PSP with necessary accessories, Pandora battery and memory stick

Enter the Sony PSP. I’ve had my eye on getting one for a while, not really to play PSP games, but to emulate the classics I missed out on as a kid.  I scrounged up a $30 PSP with a broken disc drive (I’ll be running everything from the memory stick so the drive won’t matter) from our local Craigslist this weekend, and set to work installing a custom firmware to allow the use of homebrew like emulators. Between 8-bit, 16-bit, ScummVM, and MAME I’ll have my work cut out for me!
Emulating the classics also means I can use savestates, which will overcome one other gripe I’ve had with playing these games in their original form, the need to play them all the way through in one sitting.
Installing a custom firmware on most fat or slim PSPs is fairly easy. The PSP 3000 and PSP Go are a slightly different story, and as I don’t have any experience with them, I won’t go into it here. If you want to know if your PSP can be hacked, check here.

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