PSPi 6 – Raspberry Pi in a PSP | Hacker News Reader

PSPi 6 – Raspberry Pi in a PSP

github.com

135 pointstherepanic14 comments

Anyone who has a PSP laying around somewhere should go have a look at it because the battery in them consistently turn into a rather spicy pillow. Which I guess makes mod like this more interesting.

I did that two weeks ago and it turns out that it still works wonders. Granted, mine has a third-party battery in it. It's also a larger capacity one, so you need to run it without the battery cover.

https://bsky.app/profile/mailia.bsky.social/post/3mwikc4my7s...

Yep, I was surprised to find this as well. Though my Nintendo DS Lite seems fine. I have a first run PSP (complete with dead pixels when it was brand new). Apparently a screen upgrade is cheap and easy.

A fine one-off.

Pi SoCs have no sleep/suspend mode, so you'll be pocketing it powered on or waiting for it to boot every time you go to use it. Furthermore, you have to destroy a PSP to build this, AND buy an overpriced Pi (seriously, go look at the prices now) to shove in it, which will probably cost you more than a more capable and already-built modern retro portable.

All that aside, I have been down such paths enough times to know that this stuff is drawer filler within 3 evenings. People killing vintage hardware to build "cyberdecks" that are basically unusable and will just end up in the dump soon after is just the latest atrocity along the path to hell. Do what you will.

I’m with this opinion. There is a lot of cheap to premium price handhelds on ARM that already serve the purpose without a need to break the original hardware and replace it with emulated clone. Unless case is 3d printed or sth.

Speaking of, are there any SBCs that do have smartphone-tier suspend levels and could idle on a single cell for days, waking up on a dime? The Pi line is usually the most software supported and featured and even they lack this entirely, so I'm not optimistic that it is an off the shelf thing that exists.

Perhaps a phone supported by postmarketOS or Ubuntu Touch, for certain projects?

For any suspend to RAM support at all: Amlogic, Rockchip, or i.MX SoCs have the best chance. Radxa Zero, for example. Lattepanda x86 also. But their quiescent draw is much higher than a phone's.

Awesome! It looks like eBay still has relatively inexpensive units sold for parts, so you can avoid cannibalizing a working PSP-1000 for this. I wonder what it would take to adapt the design for the smaller PSP-2000/3000.

it's an interesting idea for sure but there's always been a plethora of homebrew emulators for the PSP. do they not work well anymore? Or does the Pi just have more modern emulator options?

The CM4 is roughly an order of magnitude faster than the PSP

How does the Pi zero/zero 2 compare to the PSP1000? Link says they're the only ones that'll fully fit in the PSP case.

Pi Zero has an order of magnitude extra memory and 3 times the CPU frequency. Likely to be enough, if emulator overhead doesn't compensate for it, although I think it could.

In that case, the Pi Zero 2 W ought to be enough, as its Cortex processor is leaps and bounds better, with a quad-core vs the Pi Zero's single-core, low IPC ARM CPU.

Crazy times we live in :)

Indeed. The amount of horsepower these poststamps have is incredible. Winner in this category - for me, at least - is the teensy, that thing packs so much into so little space.

Can it run all PSP games?

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