Well, the hackers have done it again! Two clever Google engineers, Andy Nguyen and Calle Svensson, managed to crack Sony’s new PlayStation Portal handheld to run old PSP games without any Wi-Fi streaming required. Pretty impressive stuff!
See, when the $199 PlayStation Portal debuted last November, it was really limited – you could only stream PS5 games from the console, not even from Sony’s cloud network. But these ingenious techies got the Portal hardware to natively run PPSSPP, a popular emulator for those vintage PSP titles we all remember. Wild, right?
Nguyen boasts they used some slick software-based exploit so no soldering or chips needed. For now we just have a pic of Grand Theft Auto 3 up and running locally on the Portal. But the hacker promises more vids this weekend to show their emulator magic in action!
And if anybody could pull this off, it’s Nguyen. Dude’s a cloud vulnerability researcher at Google who’s uncovered tons of PlayStation bugs before. He’s even teasing another big PS4 exploit for May. When it comes to hardware hacks, this guy’s a legend!
Now it’s unclear if or when they’ll ever release the Portal jailbreak publicly. Nguyen warns much more work’s needed first. But if they ever drop the mod, it could let folks load ALL kinds of software and emulators onto the device. I’m talking native Android apps and games too! That would turbocharge the little Portal into a beastly all-round portable.
Fingers crossed these hacker bros put in the hours to get this sucker consumer-ready! Nguyen and Svensson are champions of the people – all for tearing down Sony’s walled garden and opening devices up for fans and tinkerers. But we’ll have to wait and see if they feel like sharing the PlayStation Portal goods with the rest of us.
