I'm a programmer with too much interest in too many programming languages, and not enough time. This weblog is mainly dedicated to news and discussions about one of my present interests - porting emulators to the PlayStation Portable
End to Pandora?
Odds are that you’ve probably heard about the new PSP-3000 model (colloquially called “PSP Brite”) that’s due to be released soon, and one that will replace the PSP-2000 series (”PSP Slim”). The new model will include a built-in microphone and a brighter, more responsive screen – an improvement that is almost negligible when one considers the improvements between “Slim” and “Phat” (PSP-1000 series).
Like many other developers and hobbyists, I suspect that there’s more to the system than what the press release lets on – I’m fairly certain that the new PSP model will be built differently to eliminate the extremely efficient “Pandora” hack. A recent dcemu thread discusses just that – probability of the elimination of PSP’s “hackability”, and raises some interesting points, among them “will this stop piracy?”. I’m fairly certain that the answer is “no” – and not just to piracy, but hacking in general. After all, the initial hacks of the PSP centered around badly implemented loading routines in the PSP’s image viewer and GTA: LCS, and as long as there are inquisitive people, there will be exploits to be found and security holes to be exploited. While I expect to see the end of Pandora, I doubt we’ve seen the end of buffer overflow exploits – hardware (and firmware) necessary to deter/elminate buffer overflow exploits would, in all likelihood, break backwards compatibility (not to mention prove too costly).
One thing that I believe is important to remember, however, is that Sony shouldn’t necessarily be chastised for this step. Piracy is an unfortunate side-effect of homebrew development – while I’m not going to venture a guess as to how much money the company is losing/has lost due to piracy, I’m fairly certain that it’s a considerable amount. For many, like myself, the PSP is a retrogamer’s dream come true – there’s no better way to waste hours on end than by playing Legend of Zelda, a port of Doom, or any of the large number of homebrew applications. For too many, however, it’s just a way to hoard modern games.
Sony has stated in the past that they’re aware of PSP’s homebrew community, and that their problem is not with homebrew, but piracy. While I have no reason to trust any particular large company (Enron, anyone?), I have no basis to doubt this fact in the current situation – if anything, homebrew development has helped Sony sell more units. At the same time, piracy hurts those who make the PSP into what it is – the makers of the PSP games. No PSP games means much fewer sales (I don’t think homebrew alone will carry the PSP); fewer sales means no motivation to support or manufacture the PSP.
Comments are welcome.
UPDATE Indeed, Pandora is no longer bootable in the same fashion as the older models
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And have anyone considered how much sales have the piracy generated for the game makers? If the piracy was such a problem we wouldn’t have seen even 1 new game for NDS in years, but in truth the wast one went out few days ago…
Up till now all I’ve seen is statistics how much have company X lost due to piracy but not a single one stated real numbers – they all just go to a site and count the downloads a torrent file has (the torrent file itself not the downloads of it’s content), then go to the next one, then multiply the big number by the price and announce it as loses due to piracy, but the truth is that at least 1/3 of that are due to spiders/indexers and even the other 2/3 aren’t all real downloads let alone loses. And none acknowledge how much have they earned from piracy directly or indirectly.
And what about Sony’s policies? They are the ones who make it very expensive to develop games for the console and make most of the money from piracy and on the other hand they are bitching the most about how piracy is the reason why the games for PSP aren’t selling, how the piracy is the only reason and how the piracy is killing the console but the truth is that the PSP is alive today only because of the PIRACY …
P.S. How is the hippocrate now I wonder?
You raise some good points, but surely you don’t think that anyone could put together solid numbers about how much piracy is costing? There are those who download games that they would never buy; there are, however, many who download games that they would have otherwise bought. This factor alone makes accurate determination impossible.
Look at it this way – yes, Sony itself makes money on hardware, however, as I stated before, hardware sales aren’t everything. Sony gets a large chunk of change by licensing console rights; without large companies buying these rights, this money is gone, as well as any royalties.
Piracy is not Sony’s only problem at the moment – the company has been accused of bungling the handling and advertising of the console, which also annoyed (and even drove away) a lot of vendors. But if anything, I don’t think it’s an issue that should be taken lightly – especially since it will affect the homebrew community, a large part of which doesn’t care about pirated games.
Well… Sony could make a homebrew enabled Firmware and end all this (but that’s just my opinion)
then DAX could have a break.
and there would be no more piracy (I think)
Well, Sony needs both “huge user base” and “lots of hype” for the PSP. Its main problem now is that both publishers & users are beginning to hate the device. Publishers are worried because these “as costly as PS2 games” are not selling well and users can’t find great games and blame Sony for having to buy an NDS.
The worst in my eyes is some websites trying to explain why Sony made the PSP suck until they could lock the hardware (ie. Google “psp utopia” restricted to DCEmu forums) and now how they will reveal great games & features.
BTW, if Sony is reacting like an old company is because they hate openness, they are giving PS3 users Linux access but they confine Linux inside a VM without access to the GPU and half of the memory. Look how they are giving other manufacturers specs for the EXT port of their MP3 walkman player TODAY. Yes, there are like, 3 years late, sorry pals.
Back on track: PSP is lacking in most fronts and they need to make first party titles in addition to enforcing more strict rules about the games they licence.
I do think that a PSP game doesn’t have to contain load times. My assumption is that if you port an NDS game, as the PSP have a lot of RAM, support for compressed textures and sound, and a 32bit CPU; a PSP binary doesn’t have to be bigger. And if you put let’s say Mario DS on PSP, you’ll never have load times as the PSP RAM is big enough to contain almost the whole NDS game.
It was often said that the main problem with a PSP game is the price of the development but it doesn’t have to be that way.
If you put together the weakness of the PSP and it’s strengths I see hope: PSP Live Arcade Playstation Network.
We need games that are cheap, small and entertaining, efficient games targeted to the casual and mobile gamer. Games you can try and buy from anywhere.
Will Sony make it? As every gamer that bought that fantastic piece of technology, I hope. As someone who follows Sony’s action, that seems only based upon deception these times, I’m sure I’m waiting in vain.
Another rent: how come that there are more online game on the NDS than on the PSP where there is more processing power and writable storage?