Homestar Portable for PSP

[wraggster]

via kotaku

Here's a nice thought for the PSP as we get to scheduling our summer camping vacations. Homestar Portable for the PSP is out now for the PSP and even though has no Homestar Runner on it as some tented, sleeping bagged entertainment, it still looks like a beautiful application for looking up at the stars:

"...It is for the Sony PSP, but it's not a game. It's a piece of software that helps you 'read' the nights sky. By utilising the PSPs GPS unit (I had no idea the PSP had one until now!) it can tell where you are and what constellations are above you..."

Sure it's all in Japanese, but after singing 99 bottles of beers on the wall for four hours around a campfire, everything starts to kind of make sense.

[Buddy4point0]

well ill download this when im "reading" the night sky

[The King]

wat he said

[Psyberjock]

Homestar is a home planetarium franchise that has extended an arm out to the PSP and it's really really frickin cool. I bought this to help figure out how the PSP GPS sys calls worked and I have to say that it's one of the coolest pieces of software on PSP.

It's not too hard to use either. Anyone can use it to search the sky and see which constellations are where. The only time that you actually need Japanese is when you watch the little educational movies about different astronomical phenomena. The whole time it has this cool magical Star Trek thing going on.

I think the coolest feature I found is that you can make it generate any sky in the history of the galaxy. If you want to see the last Haley's Comet, just type in the date or select it from a list of historical events. Want to see what the sky looked like to Columbus or cavemen? Zoom back hundreds or thousands of years.

I'm not some hardcore astronomer, but I love the stars and this program is easily the best portable tool for stargazing aside from a telescope or a lighter that makes streetlights go out.

The only downside of buying this software is that if you're not constantly watching the night sky, the replay value can be kinda low. How many times can you watch an episode of Nova, right?

[deniska]

BTW, you can download star maps and maps for the moon and mars in to mapThis..
I believe that in7ane@this forum managed to gps-align some star maps...so you get similar functionality for free ;-)

[califrag]

any way to get this to work with the holux gps devices deniska? some kinda prx to interpret the serial input and fake the software into using that data instead? probably not... right?

[Psyberjock]

any way to get this to work with the holux gps devices deniska? some kinda prx to interpret the serial input and fake the software into using that data instead? probably not... right?

Lol, that was originally how I planned to get the PSP GPS to work with MapThis!, but I can't get the damn toolchain to run under cygwin and then no one seemed interested in replying to me. So I decided to help JohnMPH find the syscalls instead.

Theoretically you could make both forms of GPS work with any type of software, commercial or homebrew. It shouldn't be too hard and I doubt it would take many system resources, but again, no way to try so I can't be sure.

[Broadus]

Yeah this made me think of Homestar Runner.