.FLYINGHEAD HACKING THE PSP
.TITLE Playing your PSP on the PC
.AUTHOR James Booth
.SUMMARY Sony’s PSP is a great way to take your gaming on the go, but that screen is a bit small sometimes, isn’t it? Remote Joy Lite will port the display of your PSP to a PC monitor with nothing but a USB cable. Is it truly a Joy, or is there No Joy?
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Sony’s PSP (Playstation Portable) is a great way to take your gaming on the go isn’t it? But that screen can be a bit small sometimes can’t it? If you have the AV cable your PSP can be plugged into a television for a larger display, but the composite version can be a bit hard to find if your TV doesn’t have the component hookups. What to do?
How about Remote Joy Lite? It allows you to port the display of the Custom Firmware PSP in Figure A to the monitor of your computer with nothing more than a USB cable.
.FIGPAIR A Sony’s Playstation Portable gaming platform.
.H1 The joy
With Remote Joy Lite, the display of the PSP is sent to a PC monitor via the USB cord, where it can be displayed in a window or full-screen. A larger display can make it easier to see details that may otherwise be overlooked on the smaller screen of the PSP.
.BREAK_EMAIL If you’d like to learn more about putting your PSP display on your PC, then click here.
Remote Joy Lite can also be used to take screenshots and capture video of your gameplay, as in Figure B.
.FIGPAIR B Use Remote Joy Lite to take screenshots.
Remote Joy Lite will record your gameplay as an AVI file utilizing whatever codec you choose in the Settings menu, but a little tip… I found Xvid worked better than any other; and you really do want to use a method with compression, otherwise it will eat up your hard drive space rather quickly.
Now, audio will not be recorded through the USB cable; there is a way to get audio though. If you have a 3.5mm stereo patch cable with a male plug on each end, you can run the audio out from the headphone jack of the PSP to the audio in or microphone port of your computer and the audio will be captured in WAV format as the video is captured. And you’ll want to use the LAME MP3 encoder for encoding the audio.
Remote Joy Lite will not join the audio and video together for you; that’s asking a bit much. You’ll need a utility such as VirtualDub to join the files together.
.H1 Installing Remote Joy Lite
In order to use Remote Joy Lite, your PSP will need to have custom firmware installed. A previous article in Computing Unplugged provided instructions on how to install a custom firmware, but you’re on your own in locating the necessary files, as well as in locating Remote Joy Lite. A quick search on Google or Yahoo! will head you in the right direction.
Due to the underground nature of custom firmware and the applications that go with it, be sure to use caution when searching for the files, there are some nefarious characters out there who will disguise viruses and malware as useful utilities; we’re providing this material for information purposes only.
The RemoteJoyLite.prx file needs to be installed to the SEPLUGINS directory of your Memory Stick, as shown in Figure C.
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.FIGPAIR C Install the Remote Joy file to the SEPLUGINS folder.
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You will also have to add the line "ms0:/seplugins/RemoteJoyLite.prx" to the game.txt, vsh.txt, pops.txt, and if your Custom Firmware PSP uses one, the games150.txt files in the SEPLUGINS folder. Figure D below provides an example.
.FIGPAIR D Add this line to the game.txt and other files in SEPLUGINS.
The PSP will then need to be put into Recovery Mode by holding the Right Trigger during the boot process. This will open the Recover Menu shown in Figure E, where you need to select Plugins, and enable Remote Joy Lite.
.FIGPAIR E Enable Remote Joy Lite in Plugins folder of the Recovery Menu.
Reboot the PSP and plug the USB cable into the computer you intend to use, the computer will detect new hardware and go through the install process. If it asks for the drivers, specify the Drivers folder of the unpacked Remote Joy Lite directory.
To activate Remote Joy, double-click the RemoteJoyLiteE.exe file in the GUI folder of the unpacked directory. You can double-click the display window to enlarge or minimize it, and hitting ESC will open the options menu. Here you can set the video codec to use, whether or not to capture audio, etc.
.H1 Joy or no joy?
So how does Remote Joy Lite measure up? Is it a joy or a pain? Well, it does exactly what it’s supposed to do, and quite well actually. While in a minimized window the display is every bit as good as on the PSP. But if you maximize that window, the display will pixelate. Remote Joy doesn’t do any up-scaling of the image, so you’re taking a 3-inch display and just stretching that resolution into a larger image. It’s not all that difficult to find a happy medium though.
The video capture is quite smooth, but the audio will likely take some tweaking. Most of us have the audio and volume on our PSPs turned up all the way so we can hear what’s coming out of those tiny speakers, but mix that with the default microphone setting and what you get is a lot of static and feedback.
You’ll want to turn those settings down for the best audio capture. I had my microphone level set at 15, and the audio settings of the game on 3; the volume of the PSP was still on its maximum setting. Once I had the audio set properly, the sound capture was dead-on. You’ll have to rely on your joining utility to do its part in syncing them properly.
All of the captures you make with Remote Joy, whether a screenshot, or video and audio, will be found in the Capture directory of the GUI folder in your Remote Joy Lite directory; this is the same folder from which you activate RemoteJoyLiteE.exe on the PC.
All in all, for the "money," Remote Joy Lite does an excellent job of porting your video and audio from the PSP to a PC; especially considering all you need is a USB cable, and a stereo patch cord for the audio. Remote Joy Lite easily earns three out of five for putting your PSP display on a PC.
.RATING 3
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.H1 Product availability and resources
Learn more about [[http://www.us.playstation.com/PSP|the Sony Playstation Portable]].
Learn more about [[http://www.xvid.org/| the Xvid video codec]].
Learn more about [[http://lame.sourceforge.net/index.php| the LAME audio codec]].
Learn more about [[http://www.virtualdub.org/|the VirtualDub audio-video utility]].
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.BIO
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