Descisions, descisions

Many of my friends know I enjoy a wee bit of console homebrew. For those of you that dont know, Console Homebrew, often called Console Hacking, is making your home game console do more than just play games... or you make your own demos and games for the sheer fun of it all. A good example is Cool Paint for the GBA. Its a MS Paint application for the GBA, designed strictly for free by a coder just for the fun of it. Its a really cool "game". Out of the box the Xbox (not the X360) cant play Xvid movies, JPEG slideshows, and stream networked media... with a little bit of hacking and homebrew it can! Hell, you can even use your xbox to run Linux, an alternate OS which makes it do all the things you want to do with a PC. Ok, not ALL of it, but a lot of the fun stuff like e-mail, chat, movies, music, web browsing, etc...

Ok, the point of this... I recently bought a Nintendo DS and all the PSP Fanboy fags have been giving me a belly full of bullshit about how the PSP is so much better than the DS. Im not going to say DS is better than PSP or vice versa, as a console hacker and homevrew hobbiest i am more intersted in the EXTRA things a console can do. I look at the history of the console, how easy it is to fiddle with hardware wise, and what it takes to get your own code running on it. Let me shed some light on why I got the DS.

Out of the box the PSP does movies, games and music. Allthough it has an odd sreen resoloution, making it so you need to recode all your movies. Im not denying its a good system... I just dont like sony. They tend to lock down their systems really tight, and I dont know why. The main form of storage us the UMD drive, which right now is useless to homebrew. You cant use the main means of storage to hold your code or files. They use the propritary Sony Memory Stick Duo II for the memory card slot, which until not too long ago was under complete marketing control of Sony. The cards are still kinda' expensive, and still limiting. The main way to load homebrew code is to have a known bug (called an exploit) to fuck with the PSP and make it run the code you want. There is no way to just natively boot code. Its kinda' clumsy and unreliable if you ask me. Sony keeps releasing new firmware updates fixing the "bug" which allows you to run your own code. I can understand sony doesnt want peoples stealing games, but they could embrace the Homebrew scene which has a very anti-piracy moral. The one thing on the PSP thats supposed to be a common standard.. the USB (you know... the UNIVERSAL Serial Bus) has been locked down and made natively unaccessable. That means no USB keyboards or mice... which means no kind of user/text imput. C'Mon, did you have to make EVERY fucking port, pin, and bit on the PSP 100% locked down... Good move doushebags. The only soloution right now is a PSP modchip, and to be honest most people interested in it is for the bootleg games, not homebrew. Ive been asked by MANY people to install one so they can play backup games, and frankly... installing one is not for the faint of heart. Not to mention you need a custom PSP Coding enviroment (usually linux based) to create anything. If you just started to pick up coding, and dont know dick about linux, this will set you back in your learning process. All in all, not something I want to deal with.

There are some GREAT homebrew apps and addons PSP Homebrew brings to the tabe. Not gonna list em' all, but there are Emulators, Media Players, Networking Tools, WiFi Scanners, VoIP stuff, Web Browsers, and lots of great homebrew games. I could care less for the PSP Games... they kinda suck, and im not much of a gamer.

The DS on the other hand, now it might not be as powerfull as the PSP, the hardware is more specific for its task. Nintendo does a GOOD, nay, GREAT job designing their hardware. They take a logical approach on making the hardware as powerfull as needed, and easy to code for. As of right now, granted it took a little time to get this going, you can directly boot code off the NDS Game Slot, or the GBA Game slot using a NDS Boot Card. I have a DS Lite with the M3 Lite adapter. This lets me boot code from my GBA slot using the PassKey. This also lets me use the cart on my older GBA, which I like. One cart for two consoles.

Out of the box it lets me boot homebrew code thats stored on a standard SD card, play multiple music formats (inclusding MP3), play movies (no idea what limits yet), basic PDA functions, E-Book Reader, and Picture viewer. I know the PSP has all that, but the PSP lacks any kind of user input. The DS Touchscreen makes mouse or keyboard input semi-easy. Much easier than a D-Pad. I mocked the dual screen at first, but now im liking it! It really does give a lot of options for user input. I dont like games that use it though, especially shooter games. Yeah, the screen is kinda small for movies, bit if I wanted a movie player, id buy a portable DVD player, or use my PDA with the 4" VGA screen... not a 2" iPod or DS.

Price wise getting a DS or PSP plus the shit needed for homebrew is about the same, however the SD card I can slap in damn near anything in my house, and the M3 cart is backwards compatable with the GBA, which gives me next to no space restrictions.

Plus, I like the DS games a bit more... and Sony has a track record of having suicidal products. So far my friend Mustang has 2 DS' that survived 2 neglectfull kids and a wife that doesnt take care of anything except her sex toys. However i know people that have been through multiple PSPs by now. With my track record of going through suicidal PS2s' myself, and helping others fix theirs... Im going to stay away from sony products. Not to mention that Big N embraces the Hombrew Scene. In other countries like Germany and Netherlands they hold coding competitions where if you win, they gve you a job. Plus Big N usually releases more than enough info, and sometimes even their native development software so Homebrew peoples can start fiddling.