Mindbreaking my PSP ~

Mindbreaking my psp >.< to do stuff it was not intended to do, as good of a title as any eh?

Introduction​

So my psp (It is a psp go) is perfectly functional till this day - for the most part. You see, my psp has a minor issue that the screen is no longer working . Aka, I can do everything except see the gui. So yeah we are working with some special hardware here.

Now the ideal solution would be to just replace the screen, except (a) I doubt psp screens are still floating around and (b) it is kind of a waste of money when I can just fire up PPSSPP, load a rom, and have it work just as well if not better than native. Now this would just mean I would just have my psp relegated as an elaborate external usb drive.

Except there are some problems here,

1. Thing is kb+mouse is apparently not the perfect input device for some psp games. Who could have seen that coming (*cough* MHFU / MHp3rd *cough*)
2. I dont have an external joystick >.>

Thankfully there is a ray of hope in this mess, my psp has custom firmware installed on it. So the solutions for the 2 problems are either,

• Somehow use my pc as a screen for psp
• Somehow use my psp as a controller for pc

So now we have three goals,

• Figure out how to blindly and consistently enable custom firmware boot.
• Use PC as a screen for PSP
• Use PSP as a controller for PC

Installing stuff​

So I installed PSPdisp, FusaGamePad and RemoteJoyLite. PSPdisp was what I assumed would work first but it didnt, atleast got libusb installed with it to get it to recognize psp type-b, which is necessary for the other two. The first one I managed to work was RemoteJoyLite.

So I managed to get the custom firmware running using trial and error based on sounds and memory . With RemoteJoyLite working I finally got screen output and the first thing I did was to write down all the menu items on psp for easier access when I dont have it on. Btw, number of apps changes when using custom firmware. Fun, I know . Anyways with all this info I could reliably boot into custom firmware, access gui and play games. And that was it for a while.

But with all of this being done already, I decided to revisit the third goal today. Fusa would bork my GUI output so I decided to start with PSPdisp. PSPdisp comes with two ways to connect with pc, wlan and usb.

Now the usb mode for PSPdisp, had this really fucking annoying issue called Error -2: Disable any plugins that use usb or something. Aka, it wont work with Remotejoylite on.

Wlan then. And it works, sort of. Turns out psp is a bit too old. PSP uses wpa for password while almost every single devices uses the newer wpa2 for connecting. Thus psp cannot recognize or connect to wifi . Now I know this is not a good idea but just for sake of completeness I bypassed this by disabling password on mobile hotspot and letting psp connect to it instead. And psp connected perfectly. The problem now was that I couldnt get the controls to work ugh.

Considering it was remotejoylite being the problem, I decided to disabled it in game.txt file and reboot with no gui. I tried Fusa first and it worked (I just read a min before that it doesnt work with go but it does >.> so xd I guess?).

Now I can successfully play 3ds games on my PC with Citra which are being controlled using a PSP as the joystick.
Yup, that means I can "play" MH4U and MHgen with my psp.
I am decently sure it should work with dolphin and pcsx2 too, which means I can play everything from MH1 to MH4u with my psp.