Sony’s new PlayStation Portal handheld gaming device has been hacked to emulate PSP games.
According to The Verge, Sony’s new PlayStation Portal handheld gaming device was launched in November. Still, it is only limited to streaming games from the PlayStation 5 and cannot play titles from the cloud gaming service. by Sony. But Google engineers ‘helped’ Sony’s device overcome the limitation by running PSP game emulation directly
Accordingly, two Google engineers have successfully run the original PPSSPP emulator on PlayStation Portal, allowing the Grand Theft Auto PSP game to run on Portal without a Wi-Fi network. Researcher Andy Nguyen shared in a post on XDA Developers: “After more than a month of effort, PPSSPP is running natively on PlayStation Portal. That’s right, we hacked it.”
Nguyen also confirmed that the vulnerability is ‘entirely software-based’, so it does not require any hardware modifications. So far, only one photo of the game Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories running on PlayStation Portal has been published, but Nguyen may release some videos about this vulnerability in the near future.
Nguyen is a cloud vulnerability researcher at Google, and he collaborated with Google security engineer Calle Svensson on the PlayStation Portal project. Nguyen is quite famous under the nickname TheFlow, having discovered many vulnerabilities on PS4 and PS5 machines in the past. He is expected to reveal a new PS4 vulnerability in May.
It’s unclear if or when Nguyen will make the jailbreak program available to everyone. If a mod is released in the future, it could significantly improve PlayStation Portal’s capabilities, such as running game emulators and possibly even Android games
