Fun & Games

There seems to be a PSP update which makes the USA units go to 1.5.1, not sure what it does- but I’m really reluctant to install this- with all the PSP firmware hacks to run home-brew games perhaps Sony is proactively making it harder to change the USA units. If you’re willing to update your unit though, hit the wireless update menu.

A bunch of Japanese DIY’ers had a useless old Famicom console and decided to build their own PSP. They started by tearing the console apart…Pretty good photographic dissection and assembly. [via] Link.

IGN has a blurb about DSpeak at e3. DSpeak let’s DS users make Voice-Over IP calls to other DS owners. The DS has an icon for a headset so perhaps we’ll see something soon. I’d propose a Skype/SIP/Vonage cartridge or prepaid cartridge and turn it in to a real phone. We’re getting more homebrew DS things, so who knows. Link.

Grand Theftendo is a new homebrew game for the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It is a tribute to Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto III running on the 8 bit, 256×240 resolution, 2 bit colour x 2 bit palette, 1.79 Mhz system, written entirely in 6502 Assembly Language! [via] Link.

Leaving for another day the question of whether consumers have the right to modify video-game software they’ve legally purchased, a federal judge last week dismissed a lawsuit by California game maker Tecmo against the proprietors and users of a game-hacking website, after the company quietly settled with the two main defendants. Not sure what the settlement was so this might not be over yet. Link.

A handful of clay, yesterday’s coffee grounds and some cow manure: the ingredients that could bring clean, safe drinking water to much of the third world. The simple new technology, developed by [Australia National University] materials scientist Mr. Tony Flynn, allows water filters to be made from commonly available materials and fired on the ground using cow manure as the source of heat, without the need for kiln. The filters have been tested and shown to remove common pathogens including E-coli. Via BoingBoing. Link.

Add a NES emulator to the growing list of hardware you can emulate on a PSP. But this is for the 1.0 version of the PSP which was on the early units in Japan and now Ebay. So for now, there’s only a handful of folks that can run these emulators and homebrew games, but there’s a lot of effort being put in to this and soon we’ll see emulator and other apps for our 1.5 PSP units. Via Waxy. Link.