The PlayStation Portable is Still Amazing in 2023. Here’s Why.

the PlayStation Portable was first announced almost 20 years ago and it went on to become one of the best-selling handheld consoles in history when I started this channel just by a PSP was the most common comment that I would see from people that still swear by this old device I mean surely a device from over 20 years ago shouldn't still be relevant today right well that put me on a quest and as someone that owned a PSP for several years during the late 2000s I am shocked by what I found hello everyone my name is Taki and this is the PSP in 2023 what can it do how can it be improved and is it worth buying today one of the best parts about getting into a PSP in 2023 is they can be grabbed for a bargain in most places when I knew that I wanted to make this video last year I set out to buy the cheapest PSPs that I could find locally because it would allow me to provide better advice in this video if you're thinking about going the same route that I did after watching this video there is a ton of great advice in the next two sections let's start by going over over the units that I purchased the first BSB that I bought was a blue PSP 1000 this is how the unit looks after I've gone ahead and cleaned the outside of it and I would put this at a 6 out of 10 in terms of quality the front face isn't that bad but the back has some heavy scratches on the two sides this unit is completely functional and I'm planning to do some big mods with it at the same time that I was buying the blue PSP I was also trying to find a good white PSP 1000 but those are very expensive in good condition where I live it is way cheaper to just buy a white PSP that is in bad condition and just do a full shell swap to make it look new I bought this thing for 19.46 and it was listed as being in Iraqi condition which which is a new adjective for me I have never seen a country used to describe the condition of something before but this shell has seen much better days this one has heavy structural damage and is probably not worth cleaning because of the yellow staining it's missing a battery door and it looks like it's been opened many times it didn't come with a battery but I bought an extra one and it does turn on my last PSP 1000 was the cheapest one that I bought and it came inside a protective case that wasn't part of the listing minus the missing analog cap this thing is in great condition and it was a steal for 16 with a four gigabyte memory stick and a working battery I think I'm gonna end up keeping this stock after I clean it but we might end up using it again in a future video my final PSP is a PSP 2000 and I only bought this thing because it was selling at a decent price I bought this thing for 25 dollars but I'm not sure if everything works or if everything is original send some of the component colors don't match up correctly in terms of bonuses this one was the best because it came with a 64 gigabyte SD card that was already filled with ROMs the screen on this is by far the best of the stock screens so I will keep it as it is now I'm going to start the modding process and I bought a little of everything that was on the market so hopefully I will be able to provide some good advice on potential Pathways that you can take after I put all of this to use I'll have a full list of the money that I spent on each PSP at the end of this video one of the best things about owning a PSP in 2023 is you can pretty much repair anything that goes wrong with them as long as the underlying components work so the first PSP that we're going to go over is this black one since it had the least amount of stuff done to it as you can see it does have some scratches on the front screen here but the rest of this was in pretty good condition I only needed to replace this analog top on the corner and clean out the rubber membranes I opened this up cleaned out the rubber membranes and kept the original one since they were in pretty good condition but they were a bit nasty and I also upgraded the software on this to a later version we're going to use this later in the video up from here we have the PSP 2000 and I'm not fully done with this one yet but out of all of the ones that I did buy this one was my favorite without doing any modifications to it it was in really good condition I only needed to clean out the buttons and the membranes by opening this up and I went ahead and installed a new battery I do plan on installing a glass front plate to this but I haven't done so yet because I like how the LCD looks with nothing in front of it for the price that I paid and the amount of money that these go for in perfect condition where I live I think I got a pretty good deal here all things considered our next PSP is the one that was listed in Iraqi condition and this thing required a lot of work because it was in very bad condition because of how bad it was I had to replace almost everything here and that includes the membranes buttons and the shell now even though this thing looks a lot better than it did before there are some aspects of this that make it not that ideal so if you find yourself in the same situation like I did where you can get a very good price on a very damaged PSP that you can then modify I do have some advice that I think will be valuable to you the first thing you need to be aware of at least when it comes to the PSP 1000 model is the replacement shells that you're going to buy are going to be nowhere near as good as the OEM ones that come with the PSP the plastic material that they use is a lot different than the official one and the overall quality of the shell itself is a lot worse than the official one if we rated the original shell that this was in as an F I would say that this replacement shell is a c grade there are a lot of shortcomings with this shell but I want to go over some of the most important ones right now the first thing is this middle ring that they have for this shell is really low quality compared to the original one and sometimes this power button is a bit finicky there are some areas where this doesn't fit in as it should and you can see over here with the headphone jack that it's not sitting flush with the shell like it would on an official PSP this is typically a trouble area on some of the shells that I've been seeing another area that's lacking in this replacement shell is this UMD door you can see that's bowed a bit if we look at the door on a stock PSP we can see that the situation is completely different the battery door is another part that could be a bit better this thing doesn't close all the way as you can see with this Gap over here on the corner and the last thing that's not that great is this memory card door that is also a different color than the rest of the shell the original membranes in this thing were really bad and they were not usable even after being cleaned so I had to go through and install third-party ones and these are not great these are a lot stiffer than the original ones and in some cases they can ruin your input when it comes to the d-pad I also went ahead and installed clear buttons for this mod and these have another issue that I need to go over the square button is the worst offender as it's possible for the left side of this to go under the shell when you're using it and it can get stuck there because these buttons are so bad I'm probably going to go ahead and install the original ones back in the Shell or I'm going to find a set of official ones and install those instead after I went through and did this entire modification I wanted to see how well I could have gotten the original shell if I decided to do some deep cleaning on it this is as far as I was able to get with it after some extensive cleaning and I'm pretty surprised at how well this thing cleaned up now obviously this thing has a lot of damage to it that we wouldn't be able to repair like this front screen here unless we went ahead and cut it out but it just goes to show you that you can probably get something decent with the shell that comes with your device even in its current state I would still say that this official shell is a lot better than the replacement one that I have here the unfortunate part is I wasn't able to improve the yellowing on the input buns that much even though they don't look that great these are still lot better than the replacement ones that I'm using right now so my advice to anyone that's thinking about just doing a shell swap to the exact color that they have on a damaged PSP would be to just see if you can make the original shell work as long as yours isn't completely destroyed you're going to get a much better experience with the official shell than you will with replacement shells for the PSP 1000 this only really applies if you're going to do a shell swap to the exact same color if you're going to Shell swap to something else then it might be worth ditching the original shell that leaves us with the PSP that I'm the most proud of and that is the clear shell one that you've already seen in the intro of this video this guy had a lot of changes done to it and I want to break down some of those right now the first is the shell Swap and I took off the original shell which was this blue one and switched it over to this transparent blue one because this shell was already in decent condition I kept all the parts to build it again inside this bag and if I ever find a deal on another damaged PSP I can just use this official shell to do a shell swap besides the shell I've also gone ahead and installed replacement buttons and these have the same issues that I've just described on the other PSP however the biggest change and the most impactful one on this new PSP is the fact that I've gone ahead and done an IPS mod if you've seen other videos here on YouTube about the IPS mod you might be led to believe that it's not that big of a change but I am here to tell you that it is a huge change and it's one that makes this an awesome device in 2023. in our next section we're going to go all over the IPS upgrade you're going to see just how big of an improvement this thing is when it comes to emulation and Native PSP games when it comes to this clear shell itself I would say that this is another C grade shell and it has some of the same problems as the other PSP 1000 shell that I've already talked about the memory card door is a bit better on this one but the UMD door is still bowed as it was on the other one this thing is also really annoying to install and it won't fit like it is here without some modifications the other issue that I had with this shell is that the power button won't work if you slide it into this position you actually have to click it a little further to get it to power on or power off besides those things I think this is a really nice looking shell and if I was going to do a shell swap on a PSP 1000 again I would only do so with a clear shell I don't think it's worth doing a shell swap to a black or a white PSP this thing just looks amazing and there are a ton of cheap shells that you can get with this thing another thing that you're going to notice here is I don't have that front plate that goes over the screen this case comes with a plastic front screen and I was planning on doing a glass mod to this so I went ahead and took it off but if you're thinking about doing that it is very difficult to do so I haven't decided if I'm going to go ahead and install the glass screen on this because I think it just looks so much better without anything there and I'm not worried about this getting damaged in the studio we just talked a lot about DIY modifications to the PSP but if I had to do only one or if I had to recommend only one it would be the IPS upgrade before I decided to embark on doing the IPS upgrade for myself I watched other videos here on YouTube to see what kind of a benefit it would give me and from the videos that I was able to find it wasn't really clear that the Improvement was that significant I was really shocked to find out how big of an improvement this was us and I wanted to go ahead and put together a series of tests you can see just how big of a difference the IPS screen is compared to the official one there are three big benefits that you get when you move over from the stock screen to an IPS upgrade you get improved brightness improved color accuracy in some cases and significantly better response time brightness is the easiest one to talk about and right now both of these PSPs are at their maximum brightness levels the bottom is a PSP 2000 and the top is a PSP 1000 but the 1000 with this screen is brighter than all of the other PSP 1000s that I own color accuracy is a bit more difficult to talk about and it's a lot harder to see with the naked eye but I will do a full panel breakdown on the panels that I have at the end of this section of the video the most important thing that I care about from a usability standpoint in 2023 is response time the response time is the amount of time it takes for a pixel to change from one color to the next if you have a slow response time you're going to have more ghosting on your screen as it takes longer time for that pixel to change if we go by the data sheets of the screens that were used in the PSP 1000 and 2000 we should have at most two frames of ghosting and that is not that bad on a handheld the problem is that LCDs degrade with age and if you have a PSP that has extensive use the response time and a lot of other things can be significantly worse than they were when this was brand new from all of the PSPs that I've used in this video I would say that I'm seeing about four to six frames of ghosting and that is way too much especially if you're going to be playing some retro games on your PSP the way that I've seen this showcased in other videos that go over the IPS screen is they'll play some 3D game like this and then they'll look for additional ghosting around areas that are moving like the feet on the character the problem is when it comes to these 3D games it's not always obvious to see that additional ghosting in action if we use Ratchet and Clank for example if I look on the parts of this character that are moving a lot like the ears and the feet I can see additional ghosting but it's not that obvious since the frame rate of this game is already not that high even when we go to a 2d PSP game this problem still isn't that obvious but we can see it in some areas that are moving a lot on screen like the bushes or the signs on the houses the difference just isn't that obvious when we stick to only these games if we switch over to emulation it is way easier to see the added benefit that we get with this new screen let's do that now so to clearly demonstrate the benefit that we're getting in response time I've gone ahead and picked a game that I would use this PSP to play the PSP plays Super Nintendo games very well and for this price point this is a really good system to use on the PSP but if you have a bad screen it's really going to hinder your enjoyment I have these three PSPs grouped from the best response time to the worst and I'm going to go through these three and tell you what to look for before we switch over to the IPS upgrades you can see how big of an upgrade it is over an average set of PSPs so let's start off with my PSP 2000 and this game is a good one to use because it has a lot of things that are moving on screen and it runs at 60fps what I'm going to do is run back and forth and I want you to focus on how blurry the background gets specifically these green leaves and this red texture over here so as you can see as I go back and forth we have some ghosting that kind of smears the image and you can see that especially if you're looking only on those red Textures in the background right now now let's switch over to a PSP 1000 this is that white PSP 1000 that I upgraded the shell on and this one has a worse response rate than the other screen that we just looked at if I go back and forth in this same section you should see that the background image has more smearing than it did on the PSP 2000 and the worst Defender that I have when it comes to response time is my black PSP 1000 if you focus again on those red Textures in the background and the green leaves you should see that they become really blurry now let's switch over to the IPS kit okay we're in that same area again I'm going back and forth and you should see that the background texture is a lot clearer than it was on any of the other PSPs that we just looked at if I had to guess I would say that this has a response time of around 16 milliseconds if we just do a comparison between the IPS upgrade and the slowest PSP that I have I think the benefit is very obvious the entire screen is extremely blurry and this is not enjoyable at all the experience is a lot better on the IPS screen and it's better in every game that I could play on this I hope after seeing this section that you're able to clearly see the benefit that the IPS screen gives us as it wasn't something that was really obvious in any of the videos that I watched on YouTube this was a far larger benefit than I thought it would be and it makes this device amazing for retro games not all PSPs are the same so if you do end up getting a PSP like the one that I have here that has really slow response time maybe that's an indication that you should do the IPS upgrade it'll breathe a lot of new life into this and it will make it hold its own against current options on the market as promised here's a look at the panel measurements that I got on my IPS screen compared to the other PSPs that I own the next awesome thing about owning a PSP in 2023 is the amount of customization that you can do to the software that runs on it this can range from changing the stock look of the UI here or installing custom apps and emulators the thing that I appreciate when it comes to custom firmware is the fact that we can run PSP PS1 and other systems directly from the memory card this allows us to never have to use the UMD drive but you can still use it if you want to be able to get the most out of your PSP you are going to need to mod it but there's probably a good chance any PSP that you're going to buy on the market has already been modded all four of the PSPs that I bought for this video were already modded but it wasn't something that I was specifically looking for the modding process itself is pretty simple as long as you have the right materials one of my PSPs had an issue where I needed to downgrade the firmware that was on it and the way that you do that is the same way that you mod it to begin with to be able to do that you need something called a Pandora battery and some software on a memory stick there's a few ways to go about making a Pandora battery but I usually go with the hardware mod I was planning to do that in my case but it turns out all of the batteries that I have are aftermarket ones that do not have the correct circuitry that you need to make a Pandora battery because of that issue I went online to see if anyone was selling a Pandora battery that I could use and I ended up finding a Pandora battery and a memory stick with the software that I needed as part of a package for a very cheap price once you have these you just put them in your PSP and then you'll be able to access a menu like this that you can use to install custom firmware once you've gone ahead and modded your PSP you can go ahead and buy one of these micro SD card adapters and you can fill your PSP with a ton of games the benefit here is that we can run all of our games off of this micro SD card and we don't need to use the UMD drive and waste unnecessary power on the PSP that I have here I've gone ahead and transferred some of my favorite PSP games to that micro SD card and it's really awesome being able to play them on the go especially with that awesome screen that we have obviously we're stuck with Native PSP resolution given that this is official Hardware so we won't be able to upscale any of these games or improve the look of them Beyond getting a better screen but we also don't have to worry about messing around with settings or trying to Tinker to get better performance the BSB has an amazing library of games and they still look great on this thing even if you don't do an IPS mod if you are only looking at the amount of money it costs to pick up one of these used you will not find a dedicated emulation handheld that can even come close to touching this at or around the price that these go for from a practical standpoint I think the only thing that's a bit unfortunate is that we do not have Save State support on the PSP 1000 there are plugins that you can use on the PSP 2000 and 3000 to gain Save State functionality but there doesn't seem to be one for the PSP 1000 and that's the one that I like the most the PSB can also play PS1 games that were officially released for the platform as PS1 Classics there are a ton of games in that list and those games will give you the best compatibility since they were official titles even if a title wasn't officially released it is possible to convert PS1 games to PSP e-boots so you can play them not every game works using this method but I am content with the games that do in terms of emulation options available to us we really only have control over image scaling the zoom option can be a good choice in some games but I like to go with custom and the m is stretched out so we don't have black bars on the top or bottom the good thing here is that these changes are all per game so you can find the option that works the best for the game that you're playing like PSP we won't have access to any upscaling options but the performance is decent All Things Considered I only wish we had access to save states so far we've only covered official systems that are supported on the PSP and even if we were to just stop here this thing is way worth the price that these go for these days the magic happens when we start messing around with all of the other systems that this device can emulate there are a lot of emulators available for the PSP given how popular it was but not all of them are good for example there's an official ra port for the PSP but it has bad performance in systems that run way better with Standalone options Super Nintendo GBA and Genesis are the big ones here what I want to do now is start to take a look at the performance of other systems that can run on this we'll begin with stuff that doesn't run that well before moving over to the Mainstay systems that I think you would want to use this device to play the systems that run the worst also require us to use apsp 2000 or 3000 so I will switch over to my white one for this part our first system is Dreamcast and this emulator is supposed to play at least two games at very low FPS but I was unable to get either of them to boot on my device this is the only game that I was able to get to boot from the ones that I tested and it also runs very slow the 2000 can also run a Sega Saturn emulator but this one also isn't great I only managed to get three games to run and only one of those is in a decent State here's a look at the performance of those games now okay our last emulator that requires the 2000 is for the Nintendo DS and this one is kind of a surprise given that it can even run at all the wiki states that they were planning to use the CPU and the media engine together for emulation but that never ended up happening as it stands right now this is little more than a tech demo and even games that say they are excellent in the compatibility list will run like a slideshow on the PSP now we're going to go back over to the PSP 1000 to test n64. this is another cool proof of concept but it actually runs a lot better than you'd expect if we keep sound emulation on most games are not going to run well and they also won't sound good if you disable sound emulation this is usually enough to push light games to full FPS boom [Music] that's about it for the systems that are more or less cool benchmarks I now want to go over systems that I think are worth emulating on the PSP due to the performance that you can get when it comes to Super Nintendo we are using an older core for emulation that sacrifices visuals to improve performance generally speaking I would say that the Super Nintendo performance on the PSP is pretty good but you will experience lag in games that use the super effects processor things like Yoshi's Island run a bit too slow to make this a viable option but normal games run much better definitely a good system for this handheld and again you're not going to see this kind of performance from other handhelds around the 20 price range GBA is another system that runs well on this device and it's another one that's actually worth playing on the PSP GBA games scale well on the screen and they look awesome if you have a PSP with an IPS mod as a tip there are two big emulators for GBA emulation on the PSP gpsp Chi and temp GBA I read that temp GBA was the go-to emulator but I found that it has horizontal screen tearing that I do not see when I use GPS the remaining Nintendo hand helps run just fine with a lot of options available to customize the look and the feel of your games I like sharp pixels so I've gone ahead and disabled the smoothing option in this emulator the best part is that we have a lot of Headroom with the PSP to push the frame throttle up pretty high for grindy games by default this will give us about 300 FPS depending on the game when we enable turbo but we can increase this to over 400 percent if we change the PSP clock speed to 333 megahertz in the settings finishing up for handheld systems I also went ahead and added some games for Atari Links and Neo Geo pocket both systems run well on the PSP I'm using ra for these because I don't like how they look using the Standalone emulators ra gives you a much Sharper Image when it's scaled up when it comes to PC engine I got good performance so once I set the clock speed to 333 megahertz for some games by default I was seeing some dips with a lot of stuff on screen even with the max clock speed some games will still be way too slow in those cases you either need to look for official PC engine releases or you need to go through the process of hijacking the official emulator so it runs the game that you want to play there's really nothing worth mentioning here when it comes to Sega Genesis Sega Master System NES and Atari 7800 each of these systems has at least one emulator that runs well with good scaling options there are many other systems that can be emulated on the PSP but these are the ones that I like the most Beyond everything that we just covered there are a ton of ports and Homebrew games that you can run on your PSP if you want I'm more interested in emulation but some of these are pretty good you can even do stuff that isn't all that practical like turning your PSP into a tethered streaming handheld there is software out there that allows your PSP to act as a controller for your computer and the same software is able to send over a video signal back to the PSP it's a cool proof of concept let's wrap up this video with the important question of whether or not you should consider buying a PSP in 2023. the short answer is yes but I can dig into that a bit to hopefully give you some advice for your personal situation after doing all of this I came up with four main reasons why the PSP is a great option even in 2023 and I want to share those with you the biggest reason that I can see that anybody would want to get one of these is that they just like PSP games handhelds that can run every PSP game at 1X resolution or exceed the performance of the PSP cost around 100 or more so when you look at it from that point of view especially if you're on a budget this is your best option the second reason that I think somebody would want to get into a PSP is that they just like to mod stuff this is where I fall in parts for this thing are really cheap and there is a ton of room out there for customization to depending on how you want to go I already talked a lot about the IPS mod in this video and I think that mod is well worth the cost that it went for you do need to solder to do this screen mod but the kit that I bought does have a no solder solution in the box if you know that that's not going to be for you I would say the Clear shell mods are the next best option to go for they are really cheap and if you end up buying a PSP that is in bad condition you might be able to get a total cost that is acceptable to you the third reason why I think somebody would want to get a PSP today is that they just want a cheap fur stimulation handheld I think for a lot of people this is going to be the most compelling reason I know there are a lot of people out there that see the videos that I make and they want to get started with emulation handhelds but they don't want to spend a lot of money the PSP is the best bang for your buck thing out there right now that can do a lot the BSB is a great first emulation handheld due to the amount of systems that it can Sport and how much they can be bought on the used Market if I had to go through this entire process again knowing what I know now I would only buy a PSP for emulation if I knew that I would do an IPS mod or I could could test the PSP before I bought it to see if the ghosting was too much if you're in a situation where you know you won't do the first one and you cannot do the second I would stick to searching for a PSP 2000 or 3000 those also have ghosting but it's generally going to be better than the original PSP there would also be a limit on how much money I'd be willing to spend if I only cared about emulation handhelds that can completely exceed the emulation capabilities of the PSP start at around 60 dollars with the device being completely outdone near 100 our targeted PSPs that I could find for around twenty dollars for this video but I think these are well worth up to sixty dollars in good condition the fourth and the final reason is that you just like to collect handhelds this is another category that I fall into and the PSP is an amazing looking handheld to add to any collection it displays really well on a shelf and it's a really nice piece of handheld history well that's going to wrap up things on this one if you enjoyed this video please show your support any way you can if you want to see another video like this feel free to take a look at the video that did on the Game Boy SP that's another great device that I think holds up well by today's standards happy gaming everyone take out

Channel: Taki Udon

Views: 1,616,563

Keywords: taki, taki udon, psp, playstation portable, psp in 2023, psp 2023, playstation, sony, psp in 2022, should you buy, repair, modding a psp, psp IPS mod, psp shell replacement, transparent psp shells, reshell psp, psp emulation, gba emulation on psp, n64 emulation on psp, psp teardown, psp mods 2023, should you buy a psp, pandora battery, psp 1000 IPS mod, psp ips mod vs., psp snes emulation, psp games, the playstation portable is amazing, psp taki udon, psp buying guide

Id: iZxKjhrucfA

Length: 26min 35sec (1595 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 05 2023