In a new firmware for the cloud console Playstation Portal, Sony has closed vulnerabilities that allowed local PSP games to be played. In February, a group of programmers managed to install a PSP emulator on the Portal. The hackers then reported the exploited vulnerabilities to Sony themselves, team member Andy Nguyen now confirms on X.
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“We reported the problems responsibly to Playstation. The bugs were fixed in version 2.06,” writes Nguyen, who works at Google. He rejects criticism of the approach from the community: “Do you think that Sony would simply leave the vulnerability unpatched if we made it available to the public?” At best, you would buy yourself a few weeks of time by not reporting the errors.
Hardware not ideal for emulation
In February, Nguyen published screenshots that appeared to show “GTA: Liberty City Stories” on the portal. To do this, the hacker team used the PSP emulator PPSSPP. Apparently the project did not run without errors and the hack was never published. Sony released the firmware update with the closed vulnerabilities on Monday.
The Playstation Portal is a pure cloud console and is not designed to play games locally. However, for streaming the games, Sony has installed a Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 processor, which should be able to play PSP games at similar frame rates to the original released in 2004. It combines four Cortex-A73 cores, four Cortex-A53 and an Adreno 610 GPU.
It is still questionable whether the Playstation Portal is really suitable as an emulator for the PSP. One obvious problem is storage space: According to Nguyen, the Sony console has around 6 GB of memory that can be used for emulated games. That’s enough for a few titles – the “GTA: Liberty City Stories” shown needs around 550 MB of storage space. However, there is no way to expand the capacity of the Cloud Console.
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