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Comment by p1necone | Hacker News Reader

Might have been referring to it's popularity within the homebrew scene.

The DS was pretty popular for homebrew; the microSD card adapter cartridges were impressive feats of engineering which made it very easy to load custom code. I remember ebook and graphic novel readers, paint apps, Linux, emulators for a few simple systems like the SNES, a C SDK, the whole nine yards. It wasn't as fast as the PSP, but there were still some pretty amazing projects, like this homage to Portal:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160203155724/http://smealum.ne...

Sad to see that link rot is starting to set in with many of the projects that I mentioned above. For example, the SNES emulator:

http://snemul.com/ds/

That portal homebrew sounds very interesting but my memory of the time remembers that DS homebrew was used almost exclusively for piracy but from what I have heard PSP homebrew was used a lot for stuff like playing music and running actual custom tools.

The DS has both of these. Source: I had one of these cards and may have used it for both ;)

I used my PSP to read lecture slides on the way to uni. :)

My PSP is still the best device I have for running emulators on a portable. The physical controls beat anything else I've tried - without being nearly as bulky as strapping your phone into an Xbox controller.

And recoding movies into low-bitrate mp4 of a flavour the PSP could play. Nice for watching movies on the train and such things, before that was really feasible on mobile phones.

Yes it was, I was one of those folks who did that. I had a PSP when I was in college and couldn't afford a smartphone/smartphone plan(2007-2009, this was before unlimited calls/texts, and data was obscenely expensive), but the college was blanketed in WiFi so I could use my PSP essentially as a smartphone to browse the internet, listen to music, play games, etc. The PSP could also play PS1 games (natively IIRC), so I was able to play a bunch of PS1 games on the go too.

I sold it off when I got a smartphone, but I do miss that PSP from time to time.

Yeah. I used my PSP to listen to internet radio and as a simple web browser(Lynx browser with the unique phone-layout keypad for text input anyone?). I've also participated in several different games coding competitions, that's actually how I got properly into coding, nowadays I work as a games programmer and that wouldn't have happened if not for the PSP.

I remember a guy who mounted his PSP on the handlebars of his motorbike and used it for navigation with a GPS dongle. No rerouting but turn by turn instructions to get us to follow a pre-planned route :)

I'd say at the time, certainly, but since flash carts like the R4 have become more common, the amount of DS home-brew and the quality of the scene, at least, as a home-brew dev for both over the years, seems to have exceeded it, especially in terms of longevity. But that could totally be my own experience.

I didn't pick up a PSP-1000 until maybe two years after it came out? Emulation on that was fantastic, minus the ghosting on the screen. It's still one of my favourite ways to play Sega Genesis games on the go, and even handled GBA titles like a champ.

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