Browsing the internet on the PSP in 2022

2022-3-22

The other day I turned the wifi on my PSP on for shits and

giggles after years of being unable to connect to any SSIDs

due to the security being too advanced. I found an SSID

using WPA2-PSK TKIP for security, which the PSP could conn-

ect to. I entered the passphrase, it obtained an IP address

and got online! Success! But at this point in time, there

wasn't a single soul playing Tekken Dark Ressurection online.

Not very surprising given how long it's been.

Browsing the web

But what about the built-in web browser? How much can that

do in 2022? Well, anything using HTTPS is out of the quest-

ion. This device did predate the HTTPS-only web by several

years after all. If you attempt to open an https:// link,

you will get an SSL cert error and be asked if you want to

ignore it or go back. Press X for the former and O for the

latter. Either way, you won't be able to load the page. While

that may preclude 98% of the known web, there are some things

you can do with it even today.

Browsing Gopher (via proxy)

For one, you can use =>http://wiby.me and go to most of the

smol websites on there just fine. Surfing gopher through a

web proxy like =>http://www.floodgap.com also works. I tri-

ed finding a non-HTTPS version of Hacker News but was only

partially successful. There are some HN mirrors on the web

where the internal pages are HTTP, but they don't have a

dump of the contents of the (inevitably HTTPS) article, mak-

ing it boring very fast. Just use the Gopher version's w3m

dumps instead if you really want to read HN on a PSP.

=> gopher://hngopher.com

Listening to Internet radio

I will admit I did not even try browsing Gemini through a

proxy since Gemini has TLS security baked in. Gemini requir-

ing TLS is a sound idea and I'm glad security wasn't an aft-

erthought or completely absent, but this leaves out some old

er devices and distros. One more thing I tried: the Internet

Radio app. Yes, the PSP has an internet radio application on

later versions of the OS. And yes, this still works! It uses

SHOUTcast under the hood, you can use the D-pad to thumb

through the various genres (up & down) or move alphabetic-

ally through stations (left & right). The audio quality is

as you would expect coming out of the built-in speaker.

Techno sounds pretty good, but you would get a better exp-

erience listening through headphones.

Conclusions

So...yeah! The fact that I found 3 different online activ-

ities that the PSP can still handle is impressive in and of

itself. It's been EOL'ed for a number of years and isn't

built to support newer security protocols, but this is

cyberpunk as fuaarrk. It was a fun experiment, but I'm go-

ing back to playing survival mode on TDR. Until next time!