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points by coldpie 2 days ago | 0 comments

I built some homebrew games for the PlayStation Portable circa 2004, in the middle of high school. I had some C and C++ knowledge, but barely knew what I was doing. Setting up the toolchain for building PSP homebrew on Windows XP involved a cygwin instance and all sorts of bizarre compiler and library packages that made almost zero sense to me at the time, and I had pretty much no Unix experience. I remember if I ever got linker errors, I'd just back up my source code (copy the whole dir to "game_backup_20040102" etc), delete everything, and re-do the entire installation from scratch, because I had no idea what a linker was or what the errors meant.

It's wild to me that I actually built and shipped two decent little games with that setup, lol. I put them on Itch a couple years ago: https://coldpie.itch.io/

[–] dustbunny 1 day ago

I was playing home brew games on my psp back in highschool and I think it was an absolute peak time to be a gamer.

Emulators on the psp was incredible too.

Psp would have been a much bigger hit if it had a second joystick. It was such a great console.

Also simply browsing the Internet on the psp was incredible too. This was pre smartphone. This was like right around the time wifi itself became mainstream.

Im jealous you had this experience! I tried to write some game code in highschool but couldn't figure out how to compile it. I think I used a c++ framework with a alligator as a mascot/logo... Started with an A I believe...

Wasn't until XNA in college that I was able to make a proper game.

Now I'm a professional game developer. I chased this field all the way.

Now I think making games for some of the android consoles is kinda the equivalent in that you can carry it around and show it to people. Or the Arduino is fun to make games for too :)

The smart phone is a fun target but the touchscreen really forces you into certain designs. The things that clamp to the phone and add joysticks to it definitely make the smartphone a much much more precise interface

Did you use that quick journal psp blog to spread this game? Remember when one of the jailbreaks was through a corrupted liberty city stories save file? Good times!

[–] coldpie 1 day ago

Haha, yeah, lots of nostalgia for that little guy. I have completely forgotten the technical details of the toolchain, I just remember it was GCC-based and ran in Cygwin. The games I wrote didn't use any of the hardware rendering of the system. It was all writing pixels directly into the framebuffer because that's what the hello-world sample I had access to did. For how simple the games were relative to the hardware, I frequently ran into performance problems because of this, drawing every single pixel one by one.

I did submit them to a couple of those PSP homebrew blogs and got some feedback from comments sections & such. I even submitted Dyox to a contest and won a flash cart for the GBA, though I never ended up doing much homebrew there. A couple years ago someone cataloging old PSP homebrew games actually uploaded videos of Dyox to YouTube which blew me away (sadly recorded at half-framerate, so the transparency effects don't show in the video because they rendered every-other frame).

I never looked into how the jailbreaks worked. My recollection is I only had to drop a file onto the storage and it would magically hack it for me. I actually never bought or even pirated a single game for the system, I only ever used it for homebrew and emulators and web browsing, hah.

If you're really curious, you can see the blog posts I wrote about the games 20+ years ago:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070220171034/http://brightnigh...

https://web.archive.org/web/20101012080343/http://brightnigh...