Google engineers have hacked the PlayStation Portal to run emulated PSP games.
Andy Nguyen, who works at Google on cloud vulnerability research, and Calle Svensson, a security engineer at Google, took to X/Twitter to show a PlayStation Portal running PSP game Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories natively.
After more than a month of hard work, PPSSPP is running natively on PlayStation Portal. Yes, we hacked it. With help from xyz and @ZetaTwo pic.twitter.com/AXuRROo6Ip
— Andy Nguyen (@theflow0) February 19, 2024
Sony released the PlayStation Portal as a handheld game streaming device that wirelessly connects to the PlayStation 5. Officially, it is not possible to play games natively on the PlayStation Portal. But Nguyen and co hacked the PlayStation Portal to run the PPSSPP emulator, which means no Wi-Fi streaming is required.
In a subsequent tweet, Nguyen said the hack is “all software based”, which means hardware exploitation is not required. But don’t hold your breath waiting to get hold of the hack — Nguyen said the group does not intend to release it in the “near future”.
“There's much more work to be done,” Nguyen added. However, Nguyen teased the release of videos demonstrating the hack this weekend.
While Sony has yet to announce a new dedicated handheld console, it has released a number of portables over the years. The PSP launched in December 2004 and saw a number of revisions.
Sony released the PSP Go in October 2009 and the PAL-only PSP Street in October 2011. Sony’s latest foray into handheld console territory came with the December 2011 launch of PlayStation Vita. The company has yet to announce a successor, but with the PlayStation Portal halfway there and the enormous success of the Nintendo Switch, perhaps a PlayStation hybrid of some sort isn’t beyond the realm of possibility. Meanwhile, Microsoft is heavily rumored to be preparing to launch an Xbox handheld of its own.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
