When we analyzed the portable console, we made it clear that it was just a player for our PS5. With no other offer than reflecting on its small screen what comes out of the HDMI of our home console. Until now.
The new Sony PlayStation Portal has been hacked by Google engineers to run locally emulated games. This $199.99 portable device debuted in November, but it was limited to streaming games from a PS5 console and not even to titles from Sony’s cloud gaming service.
As we say, two Google engineers have managed to make the PPSSPP emulator work natively on the PlayStation Portal, allowing you to run the PSP version of Grand Theft Auto 3 on the Portal without the need for WiFi streaming.
The player becomes a console, finally
“After more than a month of hard work, PPSSPP runs natively on PlayStation Portal. Yes, we have hacked it,” says Andy Nguyen in a tweet posted yesterday by the engineer.
Nguyen also confirms that the exploit is “completely software-based”, so it does not require any hardware modifications such as additional chips or soldering. At the moment, only a photo of Grand Theft Auto 3 running on PlayStation Portal has been published, but Nguyen may release some videos to demonstrate the exploit over the weekend.
Nguyen is a cloud vulnerability researcher at Google, and has worked with his colleague Calle Svensson, a security engineer at Google, on the PlayStation Portal project. Nguyen, better known as TheFlow, has discovered multiple exploits for PS4 and PS5 in the past.
Although the PlayStation Portal exploit is the latest in a long list of exploits for PlayStation, it is not clear if a jailbreak will be made available to the public or when. “There is no planned release in the near future, and there is still a lot of work to be done,” Nguyen explained in another tweet.
If a mod is finally released, it could greatly improve the PlayStation Portal by adding the ability to run software locally, including game emulators and perhaps even Android games.
