Lots of games were ported to PSP by homebrew developers back in the mid-2000s: Doom, Duke Nukem, Wolfenstein 3D, Quake.

The Vectrex might seem like a hard system to emulate, given its quirky vector graphics and the resulting peculiarity compared to other game consoles of the era. But even the GP32 - a handheld older than the PSP - is reportedly capable of emulating it, so perhaps replicating its phosphor monitor is easier than it looks.

The PX68K emulator saw its first release in August 2013 and by then, the PSP homebrew scene had already shrunk to a fraction of its former size. That explains the obscurity of this otherwise solid emulator for the Sharp X68000, a Japanese home computer from the late 1980s.

After Framerater, here’s another streamer who got some views thanks to the camp appeal of PSP homebrews: Vinny of vinesauce.com. The video is from 2016, so the guy had the idea a couple of years earlier than Framerater apparently.

The Commodore 64 is another of those classic gaming devices that are probably more praised than played. For the uninitiated, it can be hard to understand the reasons of the Commodore’s lasting fame. The games it features look precisely like what you would expect from any early 1980s home computer.

This article isn’t about the official Javascript radio plugins by Sony. PSPRadio is rather a genuine piece of homebrew goodness created by Rafael Cabezas. Download it here.

Having recently found out about the work of the PSP Development Kindergarten group, I decided to recompile one of the pspMAME builds from their code. Here are the results:

pspMAME is not a Mame4All, Mame4Many or Mame4Few. In other words, it’s not a stripped-down arcade emulator that shares some code with MAME. It is MAME 0.97 - the full Windows program from June 2005 - running on a PSP screen.

Now that the PS2dev forums have been brought back to life, it is much easier to find information about the early days of the PSP homebrew scene.

The vast majority of old homebrews that do not work on the PRO custom firmware can be played quite easily - just use the LME firmware and leda plugin instead. Some apps and games will still refuse to boot, however. Can anything be done to rescue them?