Ogg streaming--does it exist for the PSP already? (Or should I just make it exist?)

[NineByNine]

More stable still... archives below:

Gzipped tarball (tar.gz)

Zipfile (.zip)

[Golem]

Hi NineByNine,

I haven't, yet, hacked my wife's PSP battery into a Pandora in order to install custom firmware (4.01 will be the version). I have read that installing custom firmware on a PSP Slim may not require a Pandora battery: http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/552549 Do you know if that or another method works? My alternative is to meet up with someone who will soft convert the battery for me, some people are advertising they will do it for $10, or buy an already converted or "commercial" Pandora battery or, as a last resort, do the hardware hack myself.
It would also be useful to know which motherboard is in my wife's newly bought PSP slim without taking it apart. After I get your reply, I will decide what I will do.

[NineByNine]

Geez, Golem, like I said, I'm really probably not the guy for this. But I can tell you that in the method they're describing in that link you provided, it sure sounds like the app that flashes the battery's eeprom has to run from a PSP, and thus, from an unlocked PSP (yours won't run it until it's been unlocked... and possibly not even then, depending on your machine's board--key in the trunk thing). The magic memory stick you can write through the USB port from a Windows machine to any PSP, sure, once you've put the app on the machine, but you still need the unlocked PSP to get the battery that way to make the console boot from the stick.. I'm pretty sure once you've got the battery, either done with the software hack (flashing the eeprom with the PSP app) or with the hardware hack (lifting the pin), it'll work on any PSP, though. My understanding is: the only thing they were able to do to the new boards is stop them from writing the eeprom in the first place, so you can't actually make a Pandora's battery with the new boards... you can still use one, however it was made.

But again, caveat emptor. My experience is I've just done it the one time: did the hardware hack, made the memory stick through (I used a Windows laptop of mine) a USB connection to the (still unlocked) PSP holding the stick, and it all went great... But I'm really not a hardcore PSP hacker, just a guy who can write software if you give me a decent compiler and assembler, which the PSP toolchain now happens to be.

[NineByNine]

Oh... and re the custom firmware: Hey! 4.01 is out! Thanks; I had no idea (I've been running on 3.90...)

[Golem]

Thanks for your reply. I'm going to look into this a bit further before I commit to a particular method of doing the Pandora thing. If I try the soft hack, if it doesn't work, then I would do the hardware hack because I would probably have bricked the PSP.

I used to write code too, machine code, assembler, higher level and scripted languages. I learned programming with binary through flipping switches for setting the address, data, etc., then punch cards, then assembler, then ... I have been "out of the loop" for quite a few years. I did try to learn Object Oriented C or C++ but, when I tried, it was a new concept and there wasn't much to help in learning it that the paradigm shift in how it works was too much for my brain to wrap itself around. The PSP is tempting me to get back into coding but I have much less time left to live than I have lived to spend time focused on a screen writing and debugging code.

[NineByNine]

I knew an old-guard programmer-type who was awfully good with C++ who always said you can just think of C++ objects in terms of structs and function pointers, and tho' it's sorta *not* the way pure OO type folk encourage you to think of things, it's a good way to work out in your head what's really going on for procedural types who grok those things better... Because, after all, that's all the classes really are: structs with function pointers, and a few language features that make using them a bit cleaner than it would be if you tried the same thing in plain C... Which is fair enough, but I've got no intuitive sense of how much that help that is, as I kinda came at it backwards: I was proficient at OO approaches before I was particularly competent to work *without* them... had really only done a bitta BASIC, C, assembler, and Pascal before being thrown in the deep end with C++ and Java... Only really got half-decent at doing things in bread and butter C later... and, oddly enough, my C code at least still tends to be a bit heavy with... you guessed it... structs and function pointers...Though I think my assembler mostly looks like everyone else's.

And you can just think of templates as really smart macros, which is, actually, all they are, after all. This is the 'make this a linked-list macro', and geez, it's scary what you can do with them, and how fast... Exceptions... I have no nice parallel for exceptions. They're sorta like setjmp... and goto... but not.

Anyway, oddly enough, this Vorbis thing is all C. Lot of the code I had lying around that looked like it would get me part way happened to be C, anyway, and I found when I tried to use a bit of STL to make the URL list stuff easier, it worked fine, got the job done in almost no code, but the binary got sorta large, and I thought, aw, hell, I've still got the skills to do a classic linked list myself, why not? It may be a freakin' dual MIPS supercomputer, but it fits in your pocket... it almost seems wrong to use all this template medicine on it. So I did it the old way, and hey, it all works. If it ain't broke, y'know.

[Golem]

OO to many C programmers means Oh Oh! My C programming skills worked well with Perl, also not OO. OO is the way to go - Objective C, C++, Python, Java. I first tried learning OO with Smalltalk-80, I used to have the Smalltalk language manuals which taught the language and showed how to build a GUI with Smalltalk. I met Adele Goldberg, one of the authors, in Toronto when I was in graduate school at the UofT. She's also the person who showed Steve Jobs the GUI, etc., when he visited Xerox Parc.


Keep up your optimization skills, programmers have become extremely wasteful of resources, leaving abandoned chunks of code instead of cleaning up after themselves. There were some amazingly powerful programs written which ran on very slow processors and extremely limited memory.

The PSP is an amazing device for $169.99, I wonder how Sony makes any money from it. I wish Sony would stop trying to lock everyone out of it and, instead, encourage people like you to develop apps which would run without hacking the "official" firmware. I don't know if you're in Canada but, if that new proposed Copyright Act gets passed into law it will make criminals out of us for breaking into their firmware and bypassing their DRM. If anyone gets caught with a Pandora hacked battery, it's off to jail.

[NineByNine]

Heh. You *can* actually do OO Perl... I've done a lot of very OO stuff with it. The syntax isn't quite so obviously built for it as is C++/Java/Smalltalk, but it's still a nice way to do a lot of stuff, wrapping it up on modules which also act as classes... The stuff I'm gonna tap to do the scrolling in the list for the stations in this widget started out as a Perl module I did to handle record lists in a DB app--and even used inheritance--I'd subclass it to add specific commands to the list types, pass in objects that know how to write themselves on the line, it inherits the default 'up' 'down' stuff from the parents, so on... Not gonna use all that in the Vorbis app, mind you, just some of the display logic...

Re Sony, yeah, it's a bit crazy, the whole thing. I'm actually--sorta--sympathetic to their plight--only insofar as I guess this so isn't the world they thought they'd signed up for. And I've huge respect for the people who can make a device like the PSP--pretty little thing with all that power, and hell, it's pretty much a masterpiece of industrial design in its own little way, too. You have to be impressed... And I think it's the sum of their very attitude that makes that happen: make it seamless, make it perfect, make it clean, deliver this wonderful shrink-wrapped, consumer-friendly little jewel of technology... Make it elegant, and make it beautiful...

And then when a buncha anarchic nutters with their own wild ideas with what they'd like to do with the hardware come along, it's like... wait... this is *our* box, who are *you*? And it's got to be pretty hard for them to believe anything good is ever going to come of that... I mean, who knows who's gonna be writing this stuff, if they're any good, if they give a rat's ass about making things work right. Can't be easy for an organization with those traditions to look at open-source development and not shudder... Hell, I feel that sometimes, looking at the whole movement, find myself thinking to myself: and a roomful of monkeys pounding on their keys and then typing 'make' is gonna get us good apps how, again, exactly?

And yet it does, weirdly enough. Go fig. Apps and libs and tools might start out a bit shaky, sure, but if people are using them, and the code's available to them, they get better. Not all of them, sure, but it's a pretty vicious process, actually: what no one cares about and no one uses decays (and there's a lot of that). Stuff that gets used gets polished...

But Sony, that's not their world. They want to make things that work the right way from the beginning, and though it's an admirable attitude, it's just not all there is, anymore. I figure they're like a lot of people and a lot of organizations sitting there thinking: okay, where do we fit into this, now? How do we work with this? *Do* we even still fit?

I actually think they really do. There's always a place for an organization that makes beautiful little jewels of technology partly just because they like to. Or I'd sure like to hope there is, anyway. But I also think they are going to have to get this: the very networked nature of the world now means communities of formidable talent and curiosity can form around any technology in nothing flat, share information, and rapidly and drastically change that technology's potential. And trying to hold that kind of natural human curiosity and inventiveness back with legislation because this means some of the ways you used to do things break down badly in that kind of environment isn't going to make for a liveable world for anyone... I mean, hell, I don't want to rip off their games (and, for the record, I never have, and have no plans to, and they've done pretty well by me on the disks I've bought now, I think). I just want to be able to write the ware my way, have it do things my way, have it tune my stations without having to wait another year for the next firmware.

Dunno. Wish I could say something comforting to them. I hope 'it really is a beautiful little box, and it's a pleasure to develop for' counts for something.

[NineByNine]

Well... I *was* gonna take a night off... but then I thought I should make sure this thing is okay with 4.01 (it is), got into messing with it... Current drop is here (tar.gz) and here (zipfile)

Additions: added mono 44.1 support (needed for Radio Canada 1), made station list scrollable, added some stations to the sample config. Current list of stations known to work with this thing include:

CBC Radio One
http://vorbis.nm.cbc.ca:80/cbcr1-toronto.ogg

CBC Radio Two
http://vorbis.nm.cbc.ca:80/cbcr2-toronto.ogg

Radio Canada: la Premiere Chaine
http://ms2.radio-canada.ca:80/PremiereChaine.ogg

Radio Canada: Espace musique
http://ms2.radio-canada.ca:80/EspaceMusique.ogg

Adagio 128K
http://ic.adagio.fm:80/afm128k.ogg

FullVibes Underground Radio 128K
http://radio.full-vibes.com:8000/FullVibes128.ogg

SoundPortal Netradio (48000 Hz)
http://www.soundportal.at:8000/new.ogg

Radio Akropolis Alternative
http://www.radioakropolis.cz:8000/alternative128.ogg

We aRe oNe
http://oggvorbis.tb-stream.net:80/technobase.ogg

Entranced
http://ic.entranced.fm:80/efm128k.ogg

Xylem Baux
http://xylem.aegean.gr:8000/stream.ogg

Virgin Radio Xtreme
http://ogg2.smgradio.com:80/vx160.ogg

Radio Six International, Glasgow
http://212.72.165.20:9020/radiosix.ogg

CJSW Calgary
http://64.141.103.165:80/cjsw.ogg

M945
http://stream.m945.mwn.de:31337/m945-mq.ogg

1980s.FM
http://ic.1980s.fm:80/80s128k.ogg

[Golem]

Procedural habits inhibit learning new methods ( OO joke!). I do know about OO Perl but I have been away from programming for so long (10years) that getting back in would be like almost starting all over. Maybe that's a good thing because the procedural paradigm memory cells may have died so I can start fresh without that handicap interfering with learning OO.

Open-source is an example of Darwinism/Darwinianism - the most useful softwares survive (I hope yours does too). Apple and Sony are a lot alike, both design and manufacture beautiful, innovative, and useful products but Sony doesn't have Steve Jobs promoting its stuff. Also, Sony has had a few technology faux pas recently (Blue-Ray, exploding batteries). To improve its chance of survival (Sony lost a few $Billion in its last fiscal year), it should embrace open-source.