Pandora and the State of PSP Development

Uberjack posted this:

There’s a new strangely sycophantic article on Slashdot, regarding the start of pre-orders for Pandora, a new open-source handheld console that a number of gaming sites have already mentioned. The article spawned a number of comments regarding the other handhelds currently available (such as the PSP and the GP2X), and the “openness” of those systems to “homebrew” development. I left the following comment, which I feel fairly well summarizes the state of development on the PSP:

I’m a PSP developer, and I must admit that while getting documentation for the SDK is tough, there are more than enough examples around for anyone with common sense to pick up on the API fairly quickly. Plus, the folks at the ps2dev.org forum are exceptionally helpful (as long as your question isn’t along the lines of ‘what’s a for loop?’)

PSP development at this point (and probably forever) is very much an exercise in reverse engineering, even for the client C/C++ developer (as opposed to the brilliant minds who reverse-engineered the SDK). This explains the handful of applications/emulators that actually make use of WiFi and/or the ME processor. That said, PSP development is highly rewarding, if only in a personal sense.

That said, I wish the Pandora folks good luck. I’m a huge proponent of open-source software, and if Pandora succeeds, perhaps Sony will be persuaded to make the PSP more open to development, and maybe release an SDK.

http://0xff.akop.org/2008/10/01/pand...p-development/