The PlayStation Portal is a cool device that solves a unique problem: playing games in a shared household with one console. But Sony’s $200 handheld can only stream games from a connected PlayStation 5, making it more of a remote-play system than a full-fledged, standalone piece of gaming hardware like the beloved PS Vita. Two Google engineers, though, have hacked a PlayStation Portal to run emulated PSP games locally.
Read More: PlayStation Portal: The Kotaku Review
Buy the Playstation Portal: Best Buy | Walmart
As reported by The Verge, Google’s cloud vulnerability researcher Andy Nguyen and security engineer Calle Svensson cracked a PS Portal to play Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, an open-world 2005 game that was originally a PSP exclusive. They shared an image of their work to X/Twitter on February 19, saying that it took them both “more than a month of hard work” to get the PSP emulator software PPSSPP running on Sony’s newest handheld device.
PPSSPP is a free, open-source PSP emulator for tons of devices, from mobile phones and PC hardware to the Nintendo Wii U and Xbox Series X/S. With this software, you can play a variety of games in full HD resolution with upscaled textures and post-processing shaders that revitalize these oldies-but-goodies.
Nguyen answered some questions from folks on Twitter curious about how the emulator worked. He said it needs about 6 GB of internal storage and is “all software based,” meaning PPSSPP doesn’t require any modifications to the PS Portal in order to work. There are no videos of it in action, but Nguyen said a demonstration may come this weekend.
In X/Twitter DMs with Kotaku, Svensson confirmed that Minecraft and Tekken 6 were tested on the hacked PS Portal. He said both games “work 100%” and that PPSSPP “plays very smooth” with 2x resolution and 100 percent speed.
Read More: PlayStation Portal Feels Better Than It Looks
Nguyen also said that there’s “no release planned in the near future” because the project needs more work. However, if PSP games do run smoothly via emulation on PS Portal, that might make the device more attractive to those considering buying the $200 handheld. At the very least, I know I would be more interested if I could do more than just stream PlayStation 5 games.