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A while back, I posted about my experience with PSP 2000′s video output capability – specifically, disappointment with the unscaled output on large-screen TV’s, and the lack of support for games on older CRT’s. The post, surprisingly, resulted in a lot of feedback from the community, on this site, as well as many others – some fanboyish, some understanding or agreeing, but mostly positive and a few helpful. Main suggestion was to use a plugin called FuSa, which is basically able to do everything that the PSP alone couldn’t do.

FuSa scales the image sent to the TV, and can adjust the output frequency, to accommodate things like rendering games to CRT TV’s (which normally only works while watching UMD’s). With the several emulators that I’ve tested, the plugin works remarkably well, which only begs the question – why wasn’t this included in the PSP 2000′s firmware to begin with? While the scaled-down image on a composite output looks jagged and low-res (understandably so), many PSP owners would’ve much rather had bad output, than no output at all – myself included.

Whether or not FuSa is the reason why the newer PSP-3000 models actually will display games through a composite cable is something we’ll never know, but I suppose the point of all this is that custom firmware, and custom plugins make the PSP a lot more than a run-of-the-mill handheld. Don’t get me wrong – the PSP itself was, for its time, revolutionary – and in many ways still is. But I doubt that the system would be as popular as it is today, if it wasn’t for the homebrew community and all of its contributions and offerings. Piracy is an unfortunate side-effect of all this, and while it may be ultimately what Sony’s concerned most about, for classic computer/emulation enthusiasts such as myself, the PSP’s abilities as a homebrew development and emulation entertainment center are the only reasons why I own one (actually, two).