Sony's Playstation Portable promised to revolutionize the way people think about handheld gaming devices - and it has. Along with unprecedented gaming power, personal music player capabilities and UMD movies have come frequent firmware updates and some complaints of failed updates resulting in unusable PSPs. The original firmware in first generation Japanese hardware was v1.0, which was perfectly operational - it merely lacked an Internet browser, as well as some small extras available in newer versions. Updates have been consistently released to add what amount to optional extras to the portable system.

Sony has released updates within months of each other, and firmware version requirements are being set for many of the latest PSP games. The reasons for this are pretty obvious, with piracy rampant on every major console, making this a serious concern for commercial game producers. The PSP is the first handheld console with the ability to dynamically handle the problem, by updating its firmware to patch security flaws. But what of homebrew, the legal programs made by non-commercial developers, which enhance the functionality of the PSP by exploiting the same flaws?

Open-source PSP software - or 'homebrew', as it is commonly known - will not run on any Playstation Portable running firmware version 2.0 or later, which is the version shipped as standard on European units. There are of course exceptions to this, with v2.0 having been quite recently cracked, allowing the development of homebrew for it. The vast majority of homebrew programs have been tailored to run on versions before v2.0 however, and the predictable release of a v2.5 update has resulted in downgrading becoming popular among homebrew fans. This allows for the option to roll back the firmware to an earlier version, chiefly to run homebrew.

In retrospect, Homebrew can be seen as the inevitable result of the inclusion of a USB connection on the PSP - never before has a handheld console been so easily linked to a PC. This gave many would-be programmers delusions of being able to freely learn to exploit the handheld system for their own portable ends, whatever those ends might have been. Talented programmers have created their own home-made games and programs such as text readers.

These add-ons can be useful, but failed programs run the risk of turning a PSP into a useless brick. This is obviously a large risk for PSP users, who have been surprisingly enthusiastic about the multitude of emulators and programs. The online homebrew community ensure that testing is easy and false software is eliminated quite quickly. The link between the development of PSP software and the PC extends further, too, with PSP homebrew emulators existing to let users and programmers test homebrew on Pos before risking their PSPs.

A selection of PSP homebrew, running on a PC homebrew emulator