PSP 'opening up to modding community'?

[Shifty Geezer]

CnVG reports of a recent interview at ITMedia with SCE platform development chief, Izumi Kawanishi. Of note, apart from promises for future peripherals, is the quote

including browser support for Macromedia's Flash, further Javascript functionality and even full disclosure of the handheld's spec to the general public and modding community.

One is curious as to what this means precisely? Are Sony going to encourage the indie industry to help fuel PSP growth?

And regards Flash support, is there any likelihood PSP will be able to use MemStick as a RAM extension to fit larger pages which at the moment are just too large?

 

[London Geezer]

CnVG reports of a recent interview at ITMedia with SCE platform development chief, Izumi Kawanishi. Of note, apart from promises for future peripherals, is the quoteOne is curious as to what this means precisely? Are Sony going to encourage the indie industry to help fuel PSP growth?

And regards Flash support, is there any likelihood PSP will be able to use MemStick as a RAM extension to fit larger pages which at the moment are just too large?

MEMSTICK as RAM would be VERY slow. Not sure how slow exactly, but i don't suppose it would be faster than HDD swapping on your PC when you run out of RAM.

 

[Colourless]

It would probably be slower than using HDD as swap. Writing to Flash is very slow.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Of course using MemStick as RAM won't be wonderfully fast, it would be better being able to load some pages slower than not at all. Besides, MemStick isn't amazingly slow is it? I mean PRO can manage several megs a second which is enough for swapping out internet graphics etc.

 

[rendezvous]

Read speed for Memoystick PRO is 19,7 MB/s.
Minium write speed is specified to 15 Mbps.

(Note the different units for read and write speed)

 

[Guden Oden]

Larger webpages than memory can handle? Wtf kind of web page would that be? Even assuming the OS/browser eats HALF of the 32MB in the machine (unlikely I think), that would be some god damn big ass webpage I tell ya. Never heard of anything like it really, short of some forum thread with a ton of in-line hires images (which would be a pain to view on PSP's tiny screen anyway), and even then it wouldn't be the actual *page* that is all that big. Would take quite a bit of time to download on all of the best of connections also. In fact, 16MB on 11mbps wireless takes 12s assuming max bandwidth, and that's probably a very big assumption.

PSP's browser could use some smart image loading where it only keeps the stuff visible on screen and throws away the rest if it runs out of RAM, or it could forcibly scale down large images to fit the screen to save RAM... No idea if it actually does any of these things though.

 

[darkblu]

'full disclosure of the handheld's spec to the general public and modding community.'

well, how about they first officially and de-jure allow the running of homebrew apps on their machine. or is that too much to ask?.. whatever, the big question is: what exactly did sony screw up in the original jap firmware v.2.0 that they re-released it today together with the us release.

 

[rabidrabbit]

I have the japanese PSP with japan 2.0 update.
The browser does give an error message "not enough memory" quite often when browsing the web and opening some pages wspecially those with lot of pics.

B3D is one such page where I always get that error (the forum pages, funny though because the pages don't look "heavy" ), and often if I try to open more than one page (tabs).
Some pages refuse to load at all when this error comes, some load partially.
Clearing the cache helps sometimes.

Might be a bug in the browser software