psp lcd screen free sample

The next step of this guide requires that you remove the guarantee sticker of your PSP 3000. It means that the guarantee of your device will probably be cancelled by Sony (if you ever need it).

I have bought psp 2000 screens in the past before and what you get usually feels like a mixed bag of good and bad, first time the screen didn"t work barely at all and wasn"t really any better than what I was replacing but the second was perfect minus some ghosting which is neglegable. Now lets talk about the one I am reviewing now, it gave me no problems with installation considering its just a screen swap but right after I turned it on I immediately noticed some pixels giving some trouble. The wack pixels in itself are enough to make me not want to buy another screen from these people but its not to the point Im pulling myself to get a replacement screen, although something I keep in mind is that I"ve seen a screen with a small blemish turn into what looks like something with a pool of condensation in the middle. Something else which is less noticeable is that the screen dosen"t sit directly in the middle of the front so it looks like one side has a dark line while the other is almost overlapped by the front shell. Something I noticed is that the screen that I am reviewing is brighter than the psp I usually use for myself which may be down to something I don"t understand completely but is still something that I would say compells me to buy another screen from them if needed. Anyway I"ll keep using the screen to see whether or not it has any other major flaws and put them here later if they are important enough.

Its adaptability and its sexy black techno-design has allowed the Sony PSP to shift public perception of handheld gaming since its April debut from mere child"s play to another excuse for dad to head off to the electronics store.

But make no mistake; playing games is the Sony PSP"s meat and potatoes which it often does quite well due to its ability to display 16.77 million colors at a resolution of 480-by-272 pixels.

The flat LCD 4.3 inch-wide screen sounds small to the uninitiated, but its 16:9 resolution provides Grand Canyon type views -- ok, a tiny Grand Canyon.  Certain games are able to translate that resolution into an illusion of depth and openness never seen with handhelds.

Baseball on handhelds usually translates into tiny pixels on on a diamond-shaped splash of green.  But the Sony PSP"s wide screen adds the required oomph -- provided game developers know how to work it to their advantage as they do in "MVP Baseball" where, through a series of quick cut shots that capture both the massiveness of a baseball stadium and facial characteristics of the batter.

Racing games? Parents are advised to bring along a travel sickness bag for their PSP-strapping kids on those long car trips.  "Wipeout Pure," a popular PSP title, features dips, loops and quick turns through a futuristic urban landscape. Look too long and some players may reach for the Dramamine.

Controls on the Sony PSP mimic those on a Sony PlayStation 2 controller: Shoulder buttons, nicely done in clear plastic, straddle the top of the PSP; directional buttons and a small joystick sit to the left of the screen while standard PlayStation 2 buttons the right.

The six-and-half inch wide Sony PSP fits nicely when held by two hands.  Index fingers naturally hover over the should buttons just like with a PS2 controller.  But smaller hands may have difficulty straddling buttons.

$250 buys the PSP, headphones, battery, power adapter and a 32 MB Memory Stick Duo, Sony"s in-house memory card.  Games run an additional $50 each.  And guess what?  They come on a new storage disc, the 2.3-inch wide Universal Media Disc.

Despite what I had read about the PSP"s 4.3 inch 16:9 wide screen high resolution display and its true color clarity and other technical gobbledygook, nothing had prepared me for the "Wow!" factor.

After watching a "Spider-Man 2" on my PSP I would recommend that customers skip the DVD version because despite what one would think the experience of watching the film on a crystal clear 4.3-inch wide screen is actually quite engrossing.

I should note that some Sony PSP users have complained of experiencing permanently dead pixels on their LCD screen.  This problem came to light shortly after the PSP"s April release.

The PSP"s playback of users" own MPEG and MP3 files aren"t quite so encouraging owing to the tedious process of first shuffling files from your PC to the PSP"s Memory Stick card via a USB cable (not included) and then organizing said files in the PSP file hierarchy. The process had me pining for the iPod"s comparatively intuitive feel.  Additionally the included 32 MB Memory Stick card is no where near big enough for today"s media junkies.

The Sony PSP supports wireless 802.11b WiFi multiplayer play in the form of head-to-head competition or over what Sony calls an "infrastructure" mode where users connect their PSP to the Internet using a wireless access point.

Most multiplayer, WiFi enabled games for the PSP require that each player have his or her own version of the game, but there are a couple games where only one copy of the game is required.

It"s long been speculated that the Sony PSP"s "infrastructure" mode hinted at eventual web browsability.  Last week Sony that they would release a software upgrade allowing web browsing.

But parents hoping to cut the number of electronic devices in your children"s lives take note: the PSP won"t take the place of your kids iPOD or DVD player or computer anytime soon.

Which may work in your favor because while your kid uses the iPod, you get a chance with the PSP.  The PSP may be another power sapping gee-gaw with a built in expenses associated with a new format.  But you"re going to have to come clean.  Admit it.  You want it.

whether you are wearing headphones or not).The picture on the screen is too dim/too bright.Try hitting the little square button underneath the screen. This

toggles through different screen brightness settings.I cannot seem to connect to my wireless network.Make sure that you have turned on the WLAN switch on the bottom-left corner of your

from various online PSP-associated sites, such as PSP Hacker (http://www.psphacker.com), called Dead Pixel Cleaner by Placasoft. This two-minute video will need to be

One option is a commercially available plastic screen overlay from JAVOedge (http://www.javoedge.com/simtrix/productMtce/jsp/productListScreen_PSP.jsp;

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For pc gamers, we have for psp 3000 lcd screen like gaming keyboard and mouse sets and the systems to attach a gaming controller for pc games. These pc wireless controllers allow for a console experience on the computer. In pc gaming accessories, you will also find mechanical gaming keyboard options that are becoming very popular as many gamers find the feel of the keys very satisfying. Pick up a gaming mouse pad shipment to send along with your hardware.

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These screens are very small and cheap with "good" quality. They could easily be mounted on a small case which would make them very good for creating an - as portable as possible raspberry pi.

But I guess most LCDs for things like this - iPhone, PSP etc - are custom made for each console (maybe that open source console have a "free" LCD?) and would therefore not be very easy to use. You"d have to write your own drivers and create converters and such.

Yes. Also there are cell phone screens which include display controller and use SPI (a serial protocols) to the outside world. SPI would be quite easy to get going. You would then either have to make your own draw library or write a driver between Linux & your display. The last one is probably the bigger job, never tried integrating with OS, always cheated! There are a few old libraries around which would help with the draw. Resolution / refresh rate is going to be your problem with SPI devices. Say you can achieve 2Mb/s SPI, resolution 240x128, colour depth say 16bits you would get about 5fps max. Easiest way I know but a hardware guru may know a better way.

Forget the Pi GPU, I don"t think that it will not help. The Pi GPU outputs to HDMI and I would imagine a lot of that protocol is hard wired. I may be wrong / would love to be proved wrong as $20 is a great price for the PSP LCD screen.

I think that the LVDS problem is similar to the PSP problem. IDK about HDMI but it looks like a data stream on one or two lines. The PSP display uses 24 data lines + synchs. So the problem is to buffer the HDMI and then stream to LCD using whatever voltages.

The key concept is that to drive an LCD you must keep the data streams fed with data and get the synch pulses in the right place. That requires hardware clocking with aggressive DMA to the frame buffer memory. This is what the hardware FPGA will do for you. An FPGA is just hard wired software

You could avoid the hardware synchronizing problem by pushing the frame buffer off the Pi using SPI to an LCD with built in controller. This reduces bandwidth and has you creating your own library or possibly a driver.

Or you can sample and transcode the HDMI essentially converting serial data to parallel LCD 24 bit data (the LCD is also serial when considering a row).

Just one addition to Bradburts post - the GPU has a LCD controller/interface built in and I think the Pi design has connectors, so IF you have a screen that is supported in the driver set, then you could plug it straight in. The SoC can output to LCD and HDMI at the same time (same image) I think, not sure if it can do the same with composite though.

Just one addition to Bradburts post - the GPU has a LCD controller/interface built in and I think the Pi design has connectors, so IF you have a screen that is supported in the driver set, then you could plug it straight in. The SoC can output to LCD and HDMI at the same time (same image) I think, not sure if it can do the same with composite though.

I cannot see any reason an LCD would be hard to add, it was a question of bit rates, palette translations and synch delays many years ago, as my rusty brain remembers.

Was actually looking at this today. I came across some (rather dated) websites that suggest a USB controller board exists. Although I have no idea whether the raspi is powerful enough power this. There are a few american ebay sellers selling LDVS boards, some with composite. inputs. Might be some of these could work with the PSP screens.

I cannot see any reason an LCD would be hard to add, it was a question of bit rates, palette translations and synch delays many years ago, as my rusty brain remembers.

This is something I"m interested in myself. I"ve got a spare PSP LCD, and it would be the perfect size for an mini craptop. Or perhaps the original motherboard on the PSP could be gutted and replaced with a RasPi for a cheap, open game box. Prolly would need some kinda driver circuitry in there too though.

The PSP LCD idea would involve a lot of work. The signal formats are not the same and some fairly serious home brew electronics would be needed. My earlier enthusiasm was before I knew that the Pi LCD interface was DSI. Besides once you start working around the search feature then it appears that ppl have found loads of screens at nice prices.

Released just one month after the Nintendo DS, Sony’s PSP proved that ‘horizontal innovation’ is not the only way to succeed in the portable console market.

This article is dedicated to anyone that wants to understand, straight to the point, how the PSP operates. It’s not a short write-up, but I hope that at the end of the article you will be able to grasp the building blocks of this console (its design rationale, choice of CPUs, GPU pipeline, security system and so forth).

A cache write-back buffer: the CPU can write over cache believing it has updated physical memory as well. Then, the cache takes care of updating memory when the buffer is full.This design speeds up memory stores, but doesn’t work right away with multi-processor systems like the PSP. So, developers will have to take care of evicting the buffer when other components require those new values in memory.

The PSP comes with two memory blocks accessible from the CPU:16 KB of SRAM: this is what we called Scratchpad in previous articles. It’s small but very fast RAM. It’s up to developers to make proper use of it, although unofficial documents called it ‘useless’.

You’ll soon find that the PSP accommodates lots of components with unique functionality. So, to organise them without repeating previous mistakes, engineers interconnected them using dedicated buses. Thus, only small groups of components, with similar applications, will share the same bus. Those buses talk to each other using dedicated arbiters (in the form of ‘memory controllers’ or Direct Memory Access (DMA)).

Using the principles above, the following buses were constructed for the PSP:The System Bus: connects the CPU, scratchpad and GPU. It’s 128 bits wide.

Inside each bus, there will be multiple components working independently. They will store processed data in a shared space (such as the main RAM). Now, we don’t want the CPU to intervene whenever a module needs to read or write from memory. Traditionally, a DMA unit was placed in the bus to provide this facility, but a single DMA can only do so much. The PSP contains a significant number of components, and this will eventually lead to bottlenecks.

To begin with, let’s go over the physical screen of this console, which is where the user can appreciate everything that will be discussed in this section.

The PSP carries a 4.3” TFT LCD screen. It has a resolution of 480x272 pixels (for reference, that’s ~2.6 times the pixels of one screen of the Nintendo DS) and can display up to 16,777,216 colours. Thus, it’s got a 24-bit colour depth (the so-called ‘true color’ scale).

The Graphics Engine is controlled using traditional ‘display lists’ stored in main memory. The CPU builds them and the GPU reads them (using Direct Memory Access). Display lists basically tell the GPU what, how and where to draw. In the case of the PSP, display lists are not limited to rendering tasks – they can also include vector transformations.

Developers can supply a projection matrix to apply perspective transformation. This sends their 3D world to a 2D space (so you can see it on the screen), using the virtual camera as a model.

As evidenced, the PSP inherits various features from the PS2. The difference, however, is that functionality is now hardwired in the silicon, as opposed to offering many general-purpose programmable units (which require manual work to set them up). I presume this was done for two reasons: to use fewer transistors (so it fits in Tachyon and the board remains ‘portable’) and to facilitate porting PS2 codebases to the new console.

To show how this system impacted model design and to help compare it to the PS2 and Nintendo DS, here are two examples of models designed for the PSP. Don’t forget the viewer is interactive!

In later models (2000 and 3000), the remote port was expanded with an extra YCbCr pinout. Sony shipped three video cables (component, S-Video and composite) that rely on this interface to enable users to see the contents of the PSP screen on the TV.

The video cable will send a frame with a resolution of 720x480 pixels (in NTSC) or 720x576 pixels (in PAL), in progressive or interlaced mode (the latter option is only available on the 3000 model). As the PSP’s resolution is 480x272 pixels, games will show black bars to correct the aspect ratio. However, the bars won’t show when the console is running the ‘XMB’ visual shell, which natively supports adjusting its resolution according to the video cable.

Now, what we consider ‘sound hardware’ in the PSP is very barebones: only two PCM channels and a stereo mixer. The maximum sampling rate and resolution are 48 KHz and 16-bit, respectively.

I don’t see any of the accelerators I mentioned in the first paragraph. So, does this imply that the sound will be as limited as other cases showed? No! Because the hardware of the PSP enables to compensate it with more software.

VoIP audio decoding (G729 and u-law).The operating system of the PSP bundled a variant of the ‘Skype’ app, if you wonder what uses VoIP could have here.

In the first example, the Nintendo DS game sequences its music on the fly, while the PSP one decodes ATRAC3. As you can hear, having no dedicated sound hardware per se doesn’t imply poor sound quality. In fact, one could argue the opposite, as the Media Engine provided more features than the sound chips of most previous portable consoles ever did.

The second example is much trickier to quantify. I placed a PS2 tune for comparison, but I had to boost the PS2 one a bit (I presume PSP soundtracks are louder to compensate for the smaller speaker and the proximity to the user). Also, bear in mind that the arrangements are slightly different between platforms. It’s possibly just a creative change since the PSP game was released five years after the PS2 one. Overall, the PSP doesn’t show deterioration (considering that the PS2’s SPU2 is very powerful and flexible).

The PSP has plenty of connections and sensors. However, this section will be a good opportunity to introduce some chipsets that haven’t been mentioned yet. These play a big part in handling the circuitry that detects the player’s input.

The console features a good amount of connections802.11b WiFi: either connects to a hub or operates in ‘ad hoc’ mode to talk to nearby PSPs. This is similar to what the Nintendo DS offered.

USB 2.0: for accessories or to plug the console into a computer. In the case of the latter, the PSP is recognised as a mass storage device, providing access to the memory stick.

IrDA: stands for ‘Infrared Data Association’, similar to what a TV remote uses to change the channel. Before the release of the PSP, the infrared protocol was popular for transferring multimedia between a camera/phone and the computer. As for the PSP, however, the IrDA port went bluntly ignored.As tends to happen, Sony removed it with the second revision of the PSP (2000).

The funny thing is that these gadgets were also available for Pocket PCs and PDAs as well. It makes you wonder if Sony envisioned the PSP as a Pocket PC for youngsters.

After the release of the PlayStation 3, a new feature appeared on the PSP: Remote Play. Using a WiFi connection, the PS3 could be remotely controlled from the PSP.

Over the years, the program in charge of controlling a given console before a game starts has become more and more convoluted – mainly due to the increasing need for security and services (updatable APIs, online multiplayer, multimedia, etc.). The PSP will try to fit all of that in very constrained hardware. Now, I don’t mean to say that the result will be mediocre, but many decisions are the result of balancing costs, performance and robustness.

First and foremost, the PSP contains a hidden, undocumented 4 KB ROM inside Tachyon where the boot-loader is. In other words, upon powering on, the CPU will start by looking for instructions in there. That ROM has many names, including ‘Bootrom’, ‘Pre-IPL’ and ‘Lib-PSP iplloader’. The latter is the internal codename used by Sony.

The rest of the system is installed on 32 MB of NAND Flash memory found in the motherboard. Here is where the majority of the PSP’s Operating System (OS) resides.

Firstly, there’s the Visual Shell or ‘VSH’, which is the first thing the user notices after powering on the PSP. The VSH is a graphical user interface that allows the user to run games and other modules (only user-type ones). It is composed of multiple modules, some of which are only loaded upon request.

The complex boot process works as followsThe main CPU’s reset vector is at 0x1FC00000, which points to the Pre-IPL ROM inside Tachyon.The first half of the Pre-IPL tells the CPU to copy the other half to scratchpad memory and continue execution from there.The Pre-IPL will now look for the next stage from either NAND or an external memory stick. When the latter is selected (never under normal use), the PSP enters a mode called factory service mode. For simplicity, we’ll focus on the normal mode (selecting NAND).

This console debuts (at least, internationally speaking) the famous XrossMediaBar or ‘XMB’. This is the feature-rich GUI that was shipped with the PSP.

From a human-computer interaction standpoint, the XMB’s design reveals very interesting approaches for solving many interaction challenges (such as navigating around many depths of information, avoiding flooding the user with options and fitting all these solutions in a 4.3” screen). In essence, information is organised by ‘categories’ and ‘elements’; and the D-pad is the key to navigate through them. The left and right arrows switch between categories, and the up and down arrows select an element from within a category. It’s worth pointing out that all categories are found within the same hierarchy level. So, no entry is shown superimposed over the rest (impeding the insertion of attention-stealing advertisement and whatnot).

From the user’s perspective, some updates brought new services, like a web browser, RSS reader and so forth. After the release of the PlayStation 3, many online applications were ported to the PSP, such as the ‘PlayStation Store’ and ‘Remote Play’.

Initially, Sony only provided an emulator to test PSP software. This was later replaced with the PSP Hardware Tool: a PC-like tower connected to a dummy PSP case (similar to the Nintendo DS kit). The devkit connected to the workstation using a piece of software called ProDG (only available on Windows).

The PS1 and PS2 featured two types of storage: a read-only disc for loading games, and a re-writable ‘Memory Card’ for storing saves and executables. The PSP continued this tradition using different methods. Considering it was their first -mainstream- portable console, how did Sony manage to find the right medium for each job? Well, taking into account they were the creators of the BetaMax, MiniDisc and so forth, you can guess what they did this time… introduce even more formats.

UMDs hold either 900 MB or 1.8 GB depending on whether they are single-layered or dual-layered, respectively. UMDs not only differ physically from a DVD or MiniDVD, but they also contain a different internal structure. Apart from games, Sony published the ‘UMD video’ and ‘UMD audio’ specifications, allowing other distributors to ship their content to PSP users – remember, this is the year 2004 (when the iPod Photo had a 2” display).

The Memory Stick, like the rest, is a protocol that interfaces internal memory (like Flash) with any peripheral in a way that’s convenient. So, you may swap cards between the computer and the camera without having disassemble anything. The ‘Pro Duo’ variant (used by the PSP) has a capacity of up to 32 GB and 1.23 MB/s read and 0.54 MB/s write speed.

The PSP relies on the Memory Stick to store user-related content, such as saves, media and games. It’s formatted with the FAT32 file system. The controller embedded in the Memory Stick can include MagicGate DRM.

It’s worth mentioning that at first, the PSP didn’t include many online services. This changed drastically with the release of the PlayStation 3, but I guess this is a story for a later article…

I suppose this was a great relief for small game studios, as physical distribution always implied a significant cost, which would eventually impact the price of the game. Strangely enough, a later model of the PSP called ‘PSP Go’ enforced this move away from physical media – by removing the UMD reader, it could only play games acquired from the PlayStation Store.

Just because this is a portable console doesn’t mean it should have weaker security than the PS2. It’s quite the opposite in all senses – the security system implemented on the PSP is very diverse, with some parts still remaining a mystery to this day.

I’m going to describe the three main chips that compute security-related operations. The algorithms can be pretty complicated for first-timers, but I’ll try to give a quick overview. Don’t forget to check out the bibliography if you find it interesting, as this writing is primarily focused on the PSP itself.

Lepton contains an enormous amount of circuitry – you may even consider it another computer living inside the PSP. This component includes its own CPU, a DSP for decoding, 480 KB of memory (as buffer) and finally, 384 KB of ROM for storing its firmware.

After the release of the PSP in Japan, it was a matter of time before user-land exploits emerged. Some of them used the flawed security found in early versions of the firmware:‘Wipe Out’ embedded a web browser to access downloadable content. It wasn’t protected against DNS attacks (domain hijacking), allowing users to browse any URL in the world-wide-web.Later on, it was discovered that the browser’s URL entry didn’t verify the input. So, entering file:///disc0:/ as URL would list the contents of the UMD, already unencrypted. This enabled hackers to inspect PSP executables and reverse engineer them.

These early blunders helped to build a knowledge base of the inner workings of the PSP, which led to more attack vectors and software routines built to interact with the hardware (keep in mind only game studios had access to official SDKs and documentation).

As soon as Sony gained momentum with strong firmware updates with security patches and attractive features (i.e. a web browser), old versions became some sort of promised land, where advanced users enjoyed the ability to run their Homebrew. However, acquiring a PSP with that system version became increasingly challenging. Thus, ‘downgrading’ quickly gained popularity. Downgrading is the opposite of upgrading, consisting of replacing the current firmware installed with an earlier (and better exploited) version.

Eventually, two ‘modchips’ reached the market: ‘Undiluted Platinum’ and ‘PSP-Devolution’. Both shipped with a separate NAND chip used as secondary NAND storage, enabling the user to boot a secondary (and exploitable) firmware, or replace the primary one. This approach is only supported on the PSP model 1000, as later ones unified Tachyon and the NAND + DDR SDRAM package.

The ‘Pandora battery method’ is a popular (and respected) collection of achievements. It managed to bypass most of the security layers, and focused on where Sony could not react quickly: the Pre-IPL. This is what Pandora managed to succeed inFind a way of entering entering ‘Service Mode’: by tampering with the PSP’s removable battery, which had some circuitry attached for identification purposes, hackers discovered that overriding its serial number value to 0xFFFFFFFF triggered service mode at boot time. Thus, the Pre-IPL would look for a secondary system in the Memory Stick. The modified battery was referred to as JigKick or ‘Pandora’ Battery.Users could create a Jigkick battery with a hacked PSP, or by desoldering the ground pin of the battery’s EEPROM. The latter is riskier, taking into account casual users are disassembling a Lithium battery! Thus, some companies distributed their own ‘Pandora battery’ maker.

What remained was to embed a useful payload. Popular options included a ‘de-bricker’ which (re)installed a clean official firmware onto the PSP (thereby repairing it if the NAND was previously corrupted), a ‘downgrader’, or a custom firmware installer (more details later).

A CFW can be installed on top of the current firmware with the help of any kernel-level exploit (this was the earliest method). However, it can only be automatically booted with exploits previously used by Pandora to bypass signature checks. Otherwise, users need to rely on cat-and-mouse exploits to reboot to a CFW. That’s why the latest PSP models weren’t able to kickstart a CFW using the good-old methods.

In the end, the last straw was when the security system of the PlayStation 3 was hacked, as it contained the private keys used to decrypt PSP executables (the PS3’s OS includes a PSP emulator). This allowed anyone to sign user-land software and embed a kernel exploit to produce CFW installers and/or CFW loaders, for instance.

Not only Homebrew development centred on breaking security mechanisms, but there were also communities committed to providing Homebrew developers with the necessary tools to build their software without legal repercussions. For instance, the pspdev group published an open-source SDK called PSPSDK that replicated many of the official interfaces and didn’t enforce previous restrictions imposed by Sony.

Nevertheless, I want to thank the PSP Homebrew Community discord for not only taking the time to proofread this endless article, but also to enlighten me with even more information. Various members of that group have dedicated great effort to develop free tools and Homebrew applications to expand the capabilities of this console. My acknowledgement is also directed to all the authors that produced the documents listed in the sources. It took me ~3 months to write this article, but it was possible thanks to the combined years of work that other people dedicated to reverse-engineer this console.

The PSP was designed by Shin"ichi Ogasawara(小笠原伸一) for the Sony Computer Entertainment subsidiary of Sony Corporation. Early models pre-installed with 1.xx firmware were made in Japan but in order to cut costs, Sony has farmed out PSP production to non-Japanese manufacturers, mainly in China for units pre-installed with firmware version 2.00 and above. The unit measures 170 mm (6.7 inches) in length, 74 mm (2.9 inches) in width, and 23 mm (0.9 inches) in depth, and has a mass of 280 grams (9.9 oz or 0.62 lb) including the battery. The Samsung (previously Sharp) branded TFT LCD screen measures 110 mm (4.3 in) diagonal with a 16:9 ratio and a 480×272 pixel resolution capable of 16.77 million colors and has a brightness of up to 115 (battery powered) or 148 cd/m2 (AC powered).

The PSP uses a drive compatible with Sony"s proprietary Universal Media Disc format. Use of the drive increases battery drain by approximately 10% and the system has been criticized for having very slow data transfer speeds, translating into load times of more than two minutes in total for some games. However this has been improved with the redesigned Slim & Lite PSP which has faster loading times, according to GameSpot"s

Despite its movie and music playback capabilities, the PSP has primarily gaming-oriented controls (as opposed to the controls typical to television remotes or MP3 players): two shoulder buttons (L and R), the PlayStation, start and select buttons, a digital 4-directional pad, and an analog "nub" which is slid rather than tilted. There is also a row of secondary controls along the underside of the screen, for controlling volume, music settings (either switching the audio off and on in games or selecting different equalizer presets), screen brightness, and a "Home" button for accessing the system"s main menu. Pressing the Home button while doing anything except playing a game will bring up the XMB, which theoretically allows for multitasking; however whatever the user was doing is cancelled upon accessing anything else, except in the latest firmware release that can display pictures and play music simultaneously.

The PSP"s default battery life varies widely depending on application from less than 3 hours while accessing a wireless network and having screen brightness on its highest setting to more than 11 hours during MP3 playback with the screen turned off.mAh battery will increase this by approximately 20%. A sleep mode is also available that uses minimal battery power to keep the system"s RAM active, allowing for "instant on" functionality. A system in sleep mode (with a fully charged battery) has been shown to lose an average of only 1% battery life per 24-hour period. The PSP-1000 series is equipped with a two-pin docking connector immediately below the AC adapter jack for easy drop in charging using a docking station that was to be sold separately. However no such dock was ever released by Sony, and therefore are absent from the PSP-2000 and later versions.

On October 1, 2009 (November 1 in Japan) Sony released the PSP Go, a redesigned version of the PSP. The PSP Go features a sliding design, allowing the screen to slide up past the main controls. The PSP Go lacks a UMD drive, instead containing 16GB of internal memory on which games are stored.

The PSP"s main microprocessor is a multifunction device named "Allegrex" that includes a 32-bit MIPS32 R4k-based CPU (Little Endian), a Floating Point Unit, and a Vector Floating Point Unit. Additionally, there is a processor block known as "Media Engine" that contains another 32-bit MIPS32 R4k-base CPU, hardware for multimedia decoding (such as H.264), and a programmable DSP dubbed "Virtual Mobile Engine". The secondary CPU present in the Media Engine is functionally equivalent to the primary CPU save for a lack of a VPU. The MIPS CPU cores are globally clocked between 1 and 333 MHz. During the 2005 GDC, Sony revealed that it had capped the PSP"s CPU clock speed at 222 MHz for licensed software. Its reasons for doing so are unknown, but are the subject of some speculation (e.g. to keep power consumption and heating low). Various homebrew tools enable users to operate at 333 MHz, generally leading to a higher frame rate at the expense of battery life. On June 22, 2007, Sony Computer Entertainment confirmed that the firmware version 3.50 does in fact remove this restriction and allows future games to run at the full 333 MHz speed. It does not affect already-released games.

The system has 32 MiB main RAM in the original PSP and 64 MiB in the PSP 2000 (and subsequent series) and 4 MiB embedded DRAM in all models. The 4 MiB of eDRAM consists of 2 MiB dedicated to the graphics processing unit and 2 MB dedicated to the Media Engine secondary processor. There is no memory management unit (MMU) for either CPU. No evidence of a TLB has been found. The co-processor that normally manages the TLB-based MMU seems to be a custom effort by Sony and has no integrated memory. Both CPUs contain 16 KiB of two-way set associative instruction cache and data cache respectively. There is additionally 16 KiB of scratchpad RAM which, while faster than main RAM, is not nearly as fast as the integrated cache.

The PSP"s eDRAM memory chip is the earliest known use of a three-dimensional integrated circuit (3D IC) chip in a commercial product. The eDRAM (embedded DRAM) memory was manufactured by Toshiba in a 3D system-in-package chip with two integrated circuit (IC) dies stacked vertically.chip-on-chip" (CoC) solution.

The 166 MHz graphics chip has 2 MiB embedded memory and through its 512 bit interface provides hardware polygon and NURBS rendering, 16bit Depth Buffer, Bézier Surfaces, Bézier Curves, B-Splines, hardware directional per-vertex lighting, Bloom, Motion Blur, Gouraud Shading, Cel Shading, culling, mipmapping, LOD, clipping, Lightmapping, environment mapping, Render to Texture, shadow mapping, shadow volumes, environment projection and perspective-correct texture mapping, texture compression, tessellation, Hardware Transform and Lighting (T&L), fogging, alpha blending, alpha, depth and stencil tests, transparency effects, post-processing effects, vertex blending for morphing effects, and dithering, all in 16 or 24 bit color. The graphics chip also handles image output. Specifications state that the PSP is capable of rendering 33 million flat-shaded polygons per second, with a 664 million pixel per second fill rate.

PSP"s audio player supports a number of audio codecs, including ATRAC, AAC, MP3, and WMA, and has the option to be played with or without a set of six visualizations. The image viewer will display several common image formats including JPEG, Bitmap, and PNG. However, image viewing is limited by the file size and resolution of the image and any image exceeding a file size or resolution cannot be displayed. This is usually the case with attempting to show DSLR images on a PSP.

MPEG-4 and AVC video formats are also compatible with PSP. With reasonable video and audio bit-rate settings (a resolution of 320×240, a video bit rate of 500 Kbit per second, and an audio sampling rate of 22050 Hz) a 22-minute video file is roughly 55 MB, enough to fit on a Memory Stick Duo as small as a 64 MB. At the same rate, a hundred-minute feature film can fit on a 256 MB Memory Stick. As of firmware update version 3.30, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC Main Profile video files of the following sizes can be played: 720x576, 720×480, 352×480, and 480×272. Many video files, both free-to-distribute and copyrighted, have been encoded for the PSP and are available on the Internet. Game and movie trailers are increasingly available, even from studios" official websites.

The PSP can connect to a wireless network through Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11b. This allows 2–16 players with PSPs to create a local, ad hoc network for multiplayer gameplay; or to connect to the Internet via an Internet-connected Wi-Fi router. One can also use an ad hoc network to send images from one PSP to another by use of the "send" and "receive" functions that appear in the "PHOTO" menu. By connecting to the Internet, players can compete against other players also connected to the Internet, or browse the web and download files to the Memory Stick via the built-in web browser. Use of wireless network features increases the power consumption and results in a lower battery life.

The non-slim PSP featured a standard IrDA port located on the top left of the device. To date, the only games or applications to use this feature have been homebrew. This can be used to control many TVs as well as other infrared devices. The port is absent from the new PSP Slim redesign, probably due to the lack of any official software that utilised it. Instead, the Wi-Fi switch has moved to the top where the port previously was, so gamers do not accidentally turn Wi-Fi off when browsing the web, playing online, etc.

The PSP"s main menu allows the user to configure the system for use across the Internet or an intranet via a wireless connection, known as infrastructure mode. The PSP can recognize protected and non-protected wireless networks within its range, and supports connecting to WEP and WPA encrypted networks (WPA2 is not supported). South Korean PSPs have shipped with software providing web browsing and multimedia streaming features, but only through company-owned Wi-Fi hot spots, and with a monthly fee.

Use of infrastructure networks in PSP software began with a small number of titles at the U.S. launch, supporting online play. The RSS features allow the user to download video web feeds or listen to podcasts from websites. RSS or podcast content can be saved to the Memory Stick Duo. Audio (and more recently video) content can be streamed and played "live". After the release of firmware 3.50, there is now an RSS Guide function.

Sony"s LocationFree Player allows users to stream live television broadcasts (or other video content) to their PSP, within their Wi-Fi network, or remotely via the Internet. After the release of firmware 3.80, streaming audio is now available to be used on the PSP currently only supporting ShoutCast and Icecast internet radio.

Some titles for the PSP support a feature dubbed "gamesharing," which facilitates a limited set of multiplayer features between two PSPs with only one copy of the game UMD. A reduced version of the game being shared is transferred to the PSP without a UMD via the PSP"s Wi-Fi connection, whereupon it is loaded into RAM and runs. Such "gameshare" versions of titles usually have their feature set reduced because of technical limitations (small RAM size, slow bandwidth of 802.11b connection).