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Comment by leggomylibro | Hacker News Reader

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/

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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 :)

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