Gaming with a PSP in 2024

this is the Sony PSP one of the best gaming handhelds ever made and in this video I'm going to talk about what made it so special and I'm also going to be fixing this particular one up because it is pretty scuffed let's Jump Right In when the PlayStation Portable came out here in the United States in 2005 it was a highly anticipated device Not only was it supposed to be a competitor to the original Nintendo DS but it also promised to offer a lot of what the original PlayStation and Playstation 2 had to offer in terms of titles Graphics Etc but in your pocket now this might be my rose tinted Nostalgia goggles talking but I do think that the PSP by the end of its life cycle did offer a lot of what Sony was promising and then some I personally had a lot of fond memories as a kid playing Need for Speed underground and Gran Turismo on this thing especially since those were games that I play played in my living room on my PS2 but could play them on the go even if they weren't quite the full version however more than anything else growing up as a young Tech Enthusiast I really loved just how much of a multimedia device the PSP really was this right here is the PSP 3000 which came out a couple of years after the initial launch and compared to the original console brought in a couple of improvements namely with a brigh screen a more streamlined design and most importantly more RAM in terms of performance however for this particular unit it's been sitting around in the office for quite a while in fact I don't remember why we even got it or even the condition of it for that matter apart from the fact that cosmetically it has seen better days there is a battery in here I don't know if it's charged but let's see if it even powers on oh well we got a power light ooh the screen turns on ah yes the good old xmb still holds up today man seriously one of the best interfaces Sony has ever made more so than the PS4 and even the PS5 they really should go back to this old design now looking at the actual screen there are a fair few surface scratches though the panel itself is looking nice which is good to see but this body has certainly seen better days there's a bunch of paint chipping over here and the back has a lot of scrapes this thing has taken quite a few Falls over the years for sure hell even the plastic side rail is missing a piece and some of our buttons definitely don't feel as springy as they used to this circle button feels particularly flat and the shoulder buttons have a little bit of crust to them so we're going to have to replace a good amount of this PSP but I think it is a good platform to start with let's see if the UMD Drive functions well if at all think I just set the UMD in and close it oh it's spinning up it's making some laser noises but uh oh yeah look at that it works totally fine and because this particular console is a Japanese model the X and circle buttons are inverted for the interface so to select I have to hit Circle but that's totally fine because in theory I believe these are region free so it should be able to play my us version of neat for Speed underground Rivals fine ooh making some loud ass noises though some squeaks is that normal I mean the game's running I remember back in the day with my original PSP 1000 that the disc drive made a lot of noise but man I do not remember it being that loud that's something I'll have to look into as well though I'm sure it's fine if the game is reading woo this works totally fine yep d-pad works well X works well yeah I mean this is this is pretty good let's play some underground Rivals real quick oh yeah this plays totally fine woo yeah no this is this is good okay but yeah while this console might not look the best it certainly functions fine so it will be a good base to do some refurbishing and maybe even some mods as well so let me order some parts figure out what I want to actually do and let's Jump Ahead to actually refurbishing this thing several months later all right so all of my parts came in from Ali Express they're all spll out on the table let's just get started with tearing down our PSP and properly refurbishing it now I could just Wing It tearing down this console but I found a helpful tutorial in my research for this video I'll link it in the description and I'm probably going to need it because there are some finicky bits that are probably fine to just dive in blind but better safe than sorry especially since I want to do this right considering that some of my other projects haven't turned out quite so well some reason is not powering on anymore and I think it's because I accidentally snagged one of the ribbon cables let's just Dive Right In here so at least the first part seems pretty easy just a couple of screws gets our face plate and stuff off whenever I do these tear Downs I feel like I always end up with a few extra screws than when I started which isn't a good thing because then that means I didn't exactly put everything all together as nature intended outer screws are undone and next up is a screw that's under the battery though I guess someone had already gotten into this console because there are no screws back here so now I'm wondering what the actual quality of this PSP is maybe Austin had worked on this thing before or something so this face plate does actually come off fairly easily though I will be careful because there are things like foam seals I think that go around our screen which we want to keep intact is I think we're going to try to transplant some of these onto our replacement parts I also don't want to break anything either even though most of especially our shell is not going to be used again it would be nice to just preserve what I can in case we do actually need it down the line what is holding you captive sir oh I'm dumb maybe you should undo all the screws first before you uh assume that the console could be tored apart so that wasn't all of the outer screws I missed two of them because I'm just dumb all right now we are free and that all came apart very easily that is an open PSP so again what I want to do with this PSP is replace more or less everything that isn't the core PCV I'm going to have to really tear apart this whole entire thing bit by bit in order to make that happen so let's just do it and carefully so don't break anything I'm going to get some tweezers so the first thing I'm going to do is separate our home row buttons which apparently just unclip oh yeah it's kind of coming off okay this is not boating well for me if I can't even do this most basic step this early in oh there we go okay so that's one side or is there this is actually screwed in yeah it was 100% screwed in there we go and so our home row buttons are completely off I'm going to set this to the side we're going to have a lot of component sped out very quickly so I'm going to try to organize as best as I can I guess I can also take this time to remove remove our face buttons as well it's always interesting to see how these things work cuz it's basically just some membrane and buttons and they just touch on a point that's closer to the board here looks like our shoulder buttons also naturally fell off so I'm just going to take these off not going to lie when I open this up things just started falling maybe I should be worried that the console's falling apart this easily maybe the person that opened this up did not take the best care when they did it so from here it also looks like I can take off our screen which is just on with a flex cable so as long as I don't kink them or anything in a weird way I think this process should be fairly straightforward this is a very small device and therefore a lot of components that need to to be finagled in here all right so our screen is off um cool oh man this ribbon cable I think belonged to our home row so that's unfortunate it didn't stay with our home row and I don't know if I'll be able to put that together so far things seem to go pretty smoothly and as always with these tear Downs it's nice to see how even the simplest Parts work oh that's really cool so I'm actually seeing how they did the power switch on the PSP so it's actually this very very small PCV that's connected via a flex cable to our motherboard and there's a physical switch here that's springloaded yeah that is a very tiny board power switch is out we're going to put this on our right side in fact I'm I'm going to put this with our organizer here so I don't lose it and then I have to take apart the actual power connector here I don't think we have to actually take this out but it's probably so more so that it's out of the way oo nice our power connector is free put all of our power stuff in there there are so many Flex cables man so this is where our Triangle Square Circle X buttons touch to make an input and uh apparently this whole thing comes off but we have to be careful to not Kink it cool easy oh that's so interesting so not only is it for the front facing buttons but it's also for our shoulder as well that's quite nice wow okay so I think this is our Wi-Fi at least it's a Wi-Fi is looking connector so that seems like it'll be very easy to just take off there's all this stuff on the left as well oh that's what this is it's our memory stick door so it was missing the plastic piece on the side I thought that was just the housing oh yeah so yeah of course this had a memory stick already in it oh it had a Micro SD adapter with a 32 gig card in it I had bought one thinking that I was using the internal memory cool well I have two of these now to be fair it has been a while since I've actually interacted with a PSP to begin with so okay so all of this seemingly just kind of comes off there's a flex cable over here here that I should be careful to not up boom hell yeah okay so this will possibly make our reassembly a little easier at what point can I take out this whole middle core awesome so this ribbon cable over here that I just took off is for our UMD Drive which I am going to replace we'll see how easy or laborious that is I'm probably leaning toward the ladder cuz we do have to get our soldering kit out as you will see in a moment but again since I'm tearing it into pieces anyway there no reason not not to because we want to replace not only the outer shell of our PSP but also our incredibly scuffed chassis we have to unmount literally everything from the console that said apart from even more encounters with my personal Kryptonite also has a flex cable God damn it and a little bit of Destruction well it doesn't matter if I break it because we're placing it anyway well I bent that whole piece of plastic but again we don't need it the process was more or less straightforward hello okay well I was following the tutorial but sometimes I don't do that is it supposed to do that oh was it supposed to do that I think this is the speaker I just took out the speaker was I supposed to do that uh oh I see okay so these Leaf style connectors actually make contact with these two connectors on our board which is really neat I will take that as a cautionary tale to hug the tutorial even more as we go down further in the the process wow look at that that is our whole PSP motherboard or at least most of it yeah that is pretty small I'd say next I needed to take off the UMD door on the back how which so far is looking to be the most labor intensive part it involves removing itty bitty pieces of plastic and metal which will absolutely be a pain to put back in but then I realized something do I actually have to do do all of this I certainly have to take out my Wi-Fi board which I think this is what that is but other than that this can just stay on the old assembly and I could just put my new drive on the new shell and save myself some time so I guess now is a better time than ever to take a look at some of our transplant parts so here is our UMD Drive which I'll get to in a moment but also we should probably take a look at our donor shell okay so we will have to transplant a lot of the old assembly from our old donor PSP like the spring for the door and whatnot but yeah this don't look too bad first things first we need to take out the UMD door there we go okay okay okay okay we're good we're free and I guess we start transplanting stuff back in so the main thing I have to do right now is get this new UMD Drive mounted onto the core of our new PSP sh shell kit but before I jump in and do that something to note when you do a proper drive replacement is there is an anti-static solder joint usually on these things from the get-go and it is crucial for you to take this off before you properly plug all of this into your old Hardware otherwise the drive itself won't work now in order for me to do this need to clear some space and grab our soldering stuff because otherwise that solder joint is not going to come off okay so I have my soldering station here I'm going to heat it up but the idea behind what I'm doing here is fairly simple essentially we just have to desolder this anti-static joint over here and that is it what is a proper way of doing this without a proper soldering surface um what is the lesser of evils I don't think I should do it on the mouse pad cuz that will definitely light on fire I'm to say I'm going to do it on the wood I'm going to do it on the wood we went from following the rules to Pure chaos in a matter of seconds again kids do as I say not as I do um this is a bad idea here goes nothing Let's uh hope to God this works oh wait that was quick that was very quick oh it did it it did it it did it it did it um I might need to do a little more that's very hard to see on camera but it actually just picked up all of the solder there and I think I might have to do a little bit more but uh we are close we are close wow I think that's it let me examine the work and the best reference point I have is the actual drive that came on our original PSP I mean that looks the same okay I mean I don't know if it works yet because we haven't exactly tested it but that looks pretty much the same either this was really easy or something went horribly wrong how bad can it be how desoldered does it actually have to be oh no no no I I I see I see the difference I see the difference it is very hard to get in fact I'm just going to take a photo of this on my iPhone with a macro lens so you can actually see on the flex connector there are a bunch of different lines which run to the pins at the end of the flex connector and the desolder joint essentially acts as a wall to stop the signal going through to the end of the connector which means in order for it to work you need to see the line flat out make it from one end of the cable to the other through the joint which now that I'm looking at it is not quite there so let me do a little more work here that might be it that might be it that looks like a straight line I'm going to do one more it's more of a sanity check yeah I think I'll call that good ideally you're using a magnifying glass for this but I have very good eyes even though I'm wearing glasses yeah dude I think we did it we didn't need those fancy tools at all I'm feeling confident with this the hard stuff is out of the way the rest of it is just putting back what I tore apart I'm feeling happy now but watch it not work watch it not work cautious optimism aside I pushed along the UMD door was a pain to sort out as expected but eventually I figured it out I put our motherboard back into place all of the cables and connectors for our power as well as the buttons honestly it felt as straight forward as the tear down itself short of these stupid ribbon cables again okay well maybe that wasn't as hard as I thought it would be that's what she said okay okay okay cool and down Sick and the final cable before we move on to the next step is the UMD drive flex cable which actually doesn't look too bad because the cable is quite large got to like wiggle it in make sure that it's properly seated you could do a little test and that is in there my friends yes all right the hard stuff is finally past us it's time to just put our head down and get the reassembly really going eventually I got our screen and the power all reconnected though before I Sprint to the Finish let's plug in our AC adapter and check our work to make sure the screen is all good and turn it on oh we got a light okay that's not good we have some uh some screen issues there which are most certainly my doing we know that the PSP works just not optimally what is wrong here what uh what what I do what I do I am quite scared I mean I did put a little bit of pressure on the flex cable but not much can't be that bad right okay we'll try it one more time so at least we know that our power button Works our screen up I mean that's not the worst thing in the world like they only cost like $15 which I mean it sucks that I have to buy another one but uh really what could possibly went wrong I mean it's not like I'm the most careful person but I did try to baby it a little bit what happened [Music] here not to remedy the screen but while I'm here and testing things I'm going to take out our new set of buttons because if I'm going to be ordering some extra spare parts I should at least look into what is actually working for me right now so I'm going to put our membrane buttons on here okay so they do work testing the direction pad totally fine as well so the transplant worked as intended we obviously get the placement of these things actually right but it's good to see that that stuff works the main thing I need to do now is get a new screen for this guy there's a part of me that's impatient and wants to finish this part of the project today let's go on let's go on the journey so as no surprise to probably no one overclock media has a bunch of PlayStations hopefully we have a PSP 3000 here that I could use to help the cause which is to fix my PSP I'm going to try to see what's inside of this one here maybe this could be our donor survey says not going to lie that's actually kind of all right is Austin here hello hi I have a question at this point I want boss man to bite if I have any shot of finishing this today after all it already took my components a month to show up I don't have another month to work on this video Woo no before before you jump to mod that one that's the one we already have that you want to tear AP right now cuz you broke it did I get it right the first time partially yes what' you break I need a new screen why so the screen that I have on it right now the one that we fixed yeah is is if we're going by pixels is half working so you had half your pixels working yes couldn't you just buy like a third party nicer upgraded LCD display yes are you too lazy to wait for Amazon to show up with prime shipping with that display yes so instead you're going to tear apart a perfectly good PSP just to steal the screen out of it yes that's your pitch tell him he's wrong you're wrong you're wrong and you're dumb he wants to tear part of PSP cuz he broke his screen so he wants another screen wow oh it's so easy I'll just should be able to do it it's easy super easy I don't need any help as it stands yeah it is all in so this is the original display this is the original display yeah did it as best as I could I mean are you sure it's fully seated in there I reseated it twice and it does the same exact thing I'll show you what it does oh it's like interlay yeah I I as I said half my pixels work ship it why not ship what what do you mean ship it how do you know that but how you know the screen though because look at the look at the bottom the Bottom's fine bottom oh yeah well I I'll tell you as someone that has used this for at least an hour I'll tell you that that's not the way it yeah I know it's not supposed to like that yeah well I certainly might seem a bit lazy not even wanting to use Amazon Prime the replacement screens on there might be of dubious quality PSP 3,000 dank videos are getting very expensive lately 30 bucks two stars on Amazon are you kidding me I don't I'm not going to trust that for a second what are what are the ratings on this it's in Spanish I don't know what it says Kelly dad defectuosa okay that's that's that that that's probably Spanish for defective it's probably accurate I believe that after promising Austin I'd get a replacement screen to replace our replacement fine and I promise I won't break the new one mhm likely [Music] story for the sake of the content we are going to do it this way but obviously don't ruin PSPs just to fix them do as I say not as I do right now that I'm an expert PSP P opener it only took a few moments to get our donor console open and our new slus screen free screen is free okay okay okay okay okay okay so I pushed forward hopped it over onto our refurbished PSP and then okay we're good so it was a screen problem so I think if I had to Hazard a guess what went wrong with the other screen versus what I just did was surprise surprise this Flex cable right here is very delicate super thin and I probably just HIIT it in a weird way when I was trying to finagle it into place probably scratched it a little too much and the little leads on here probably just I don't know got kinked to a point where they just don't work anymore it's a shame but the very least we got a working screen now and most importantly uh nothing else is broken however just as I fixed one problem another one had emerged and this one kind of hurts just when I thought things were going fine I've run into a major issue there's a UMD in here it is spinning but it sounds like the drive is having issues reading the game there's almost this rhythmic pattern to its scanning and it's just not doing anything at all could it be the solder joint oh man I don't know that's really hard to diagnose in any case that's certainly not normal okay so from this point point I think there are a few ways that I can proceed one I can undo a lot of the work that I just did which I don't think there a lot it just be timec consuming more than anything I can also take out our newd drive and put in the old one that I know Works albeit it is loud or I can be lazy and just commit to the fact that inevitably I'm going to have to install software mods on this anyway and will be running robs cuz I will 100% be doing that over playing UMD games anyway I mean it's not that much work the thing is I really only have one UMD that I'm going to play on this thing and it's the one that I grew up with Need for Speed Rivals but I could just get a ROM of this and play it on the memory stick and it'd be totally fine I need to make a decision quick um uh oh my God 3 days later at long last here is the finished product my refurbished PSP 3000 and I think it looks pretty sharp I'm happy that I went with the translucent green it's a great pop of color the white buttons on the front add some good contrast to breid things up a bit and while I'm going back and forth on whether or not I like these red shoulder buttons because it makes the color scheme look a bit like Christmas I'll say that how the color actually appears through the transparent plastic is cool it almost looks like tail lights on a car beyond the color this shell from AliExpress is actually very high quality at least on the exterior details I specifically chose this one because all of the logos and Engravings on it look properly OEM at least from the website and yeah in person it does look very spot-on transplanting the components on on to this new shell did require some minor improvisation here and there since it wasn't 100% like the Sony shell but it is par for the course with third-party Parts like this especially since the PSP has been discontinued for quite a while and even still the fit and finish on this looks really nice now if you look at the back here you might notice that there is no UMD inserted and that's because I've decided to turn a blind eye to my driver placement issues lean into the failure and proceed without looking back while it sucks that the console isn't fully functioning so that I can play Need for Speed underground like nature intended I'd rather not tempt Fate by doing a secondary deep tear down to trace the problem when I otherwise have a working functioning console and honestly this is a far cry from being the end of the world for one I can move on knowing that our original UMD Drive drive that came with this PSP should in fact still work perhaps with a little bit of elbow grease and actual grease lathering up the components in there should remedy most of the egregious screeching noises that I heard a few weeks ago secondly I also have the other donor PSP that Austin lent me that also does have a confirmed UMD Drive working as well that I could swap in to this console but really the Huff of copium here is that I've installed custom firmware so that I can play whatever games I want right from the memory card man I haven't done this maybe since like high school with my PSP 1000 but compared to back then hacking a PSP these days is so easy I'll link the guides I used in the description below but it took me all of like 2 minutes to do and now I am able to load all of the old isos that I've had sitting around in cold storage for at least over a decade using a Micro SD card to memory stick Duo adapter as well as a fast micro SD card you can dump tons of games on here in no time that being said it's really awesome that I can get back to some very nostalgic titles such as Project Diva extend which is probably one of the first games I played in my anime fandom this was essentially a very barebones rhythm game with a lot of really cool music and I got to say the new screen that we installed here looks miles better than the old one that we were dealing with even though I did probably break something in the reinstallation of the old screen this one isn't flickering the color is way better so I think even if I did put it in right it was probably going to go out at some point so I'm happy that we did a screen replacement oh man I still got it and a game like this is really good to test our buttons as well because a lot of it is dependent on timing though I'm not doing great right now cuz I'm talking to camera but um our buttons feel really good especially for a lot of the notes that require you to press both the d-pad and the interface buttons so I'm actually really happy with how all of that turned out we didn't really break any of the inputs in the process which is one of the things that I was worried about though I guess there's not really much to mess up but you never know another game that I played a lot growing up on the PSP was Grand Turismo now it's been a while and there have been a bunch of entries in the series since this one has come out to the point where I honestly don't remember it a whole lot but I imagine a game like Gran Turismo which has decent Graphics traditionally would also be a great way to see how our screen is and oh my God look at all of these courses the Throwbacks Wow Let's do trial Mountain this is the one that I absolutely played the most oh yeah that is definitely trial Mountain Man the graphics that you can get on the PSP are seriously impressive for the time I mean while the goal was to make a PS2 but in your pocket it's certainly not PS2 Graphics but man for something that you can play like on your commute to work or to school man this is nice look at all of the lighting effects the 3D looks seriously nice too Sony was really on to something with this console back in the early 2000s and also while we're talking about the graphics I do like the way that our new screen looks actually looking at it the only gripe that I have with this shell that we bought off of AliExpress is that and I didn't really notice it before but there is a Nick on the inner side of our screen lens if I pull up our PS quit menu here it almost kind of looks like a speck of dust but that's actually just a Nick which is a shame that that's there but also when you're in the heat of gameplay it's hardly noticeable especially at full brightness downloading custom firmware on your PSP allows you to play a bunch of different games but there were also a lot of wacky applications that existed on both UMD and on the PSN store that added a bit of convenience to your life especially with add-on accessories like this GPS module which I was able to buy with the Box in 2024 plus I was able to find a navigation app that apparently still works some 15 to 20 years after release and so we are going to try to navigate around town using this GPS module and my new PSP in 2024 what all right so we are in the company car and I have our PSP set up with the GPS module and go explore which is our navigation app so the idea here is that we can actually use this to get from point A to point point B with turn BYT directions and whatnot and supposedly all the GPS stuff still works so let's try it out ah the classic PSP sound wow that is very 2008 now in doing my research with this the only issue with go explore is that the actual points of interest are still locked to like 2008 or 2009 just keeping that in mind you probably won't find your newest Boba spot around the corner or anything like that but as long as the business has existed for like 10 or 15 years it's probably in here well first of all let's just look at the map and see what that looks like yeah just standard GPS I don't like I don't know what else I was expecting here so I can change my view here we have a bird's eye one right now if I hit Square it's more of a POV if you will which I think will actually Center itself once we start navigating yeah I mean let's just go find some points of interest and navigate pretty sure they had Best Buy Back back then oh they absolutely did Best Buy the first one that shows up is the one that's probably a couple of exits away on the freeway hit go and there we are let's just set off and uh see how well this go explore app actually is 100 M turn left okay so there are not only turn BYT directions but a very pleasant sounding British ladies telling us where to go as well Cheerio no idea yeah this looks so proper M turn left and we get voice turn by turn directions too yo 8 m exit right thank you oh wasn't that supposed to do that I think I I just didn't listen to it I misunderstood what it wanted all right it wanted us to go on the freeway and I'll be real like the speed that it's reading on here is pretty accurate to what I'm seeing on my speedometer so is the PSP GPS module and go explore actually usable in 20 24 surprisingly yes something else cool that I found is if you go into the settings and hit GPS it'll actually give you a readout of the satellites it's connecting to and kind of the connection status as well as your altitude or elevation and the speed that you're traveling with as well the level of information you get might not be as robust but it's still really surprising how much it actually gives you in terms of accuracy and information apparently we are are 161 yards over sea level why is it in yards so the GPS module retailed I think in Japan for around 6,000 Yen which is about in at least today's dollars which is not what it was before is roughly around 50 bucks same thing can be said about the go explore application I bought the UMD I paid about $60 for that and a lot of that was really shipping from Europe because uh I had to import it so so for like $110 should you go out and buy a PSP navigation device for your actual daily use probably not but I think as a novelty I mean come on this thing is kind of rad right oh man yeah this is actually doing it the Best Buy is literally up ahead hey yo hey it's right here I overshot the entrance talk about the most 208 thing that I've done in a long time we navigated to Best Buy on my PSP using a PSP GPS module in a 2018 Toyota 4Runner that might as well be a 2008 4Runner cuz they never really changed the only thing I have to do now is buy like a noia or something in here and we'll be all set yo dang this was an interesting experience this is wild the fact that there's something connectivity related on the PSP that still works in this day and age is honestly a blessing obviously this console has been long out of support from Sony and most importantly I was trying to connect over Wi-Fi to the networks over in the studio and it would not connect to anything so the fact that I can actually access GPS satellites here in 2024 is probably the most I don't even know how to describe I'm just I'm just dumbfounded that it works it there's no reason why I wouldn't but it still does and that makes me very happy and that my friends was refurbing a PSP in 2024 let me know how you thought I did in the comments below as as well as what color you would pick and otherwise I'll catch youall in the next one

Channel: Denki

Views: 200,832

Keywords: playstation portable, ps vita

Id: WYkuS2Q6n3k

Length: 36min 32sec (2192 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 23 2024