The PS Portal Has Been Hacked To Play PSP Games

Rahul Majumdar
·2 min read
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playstation-portal

The PlayStation Portal has been mocked for not being able to run games natively, but that’s about to change. The handheld designed exclusively for streaming PS5 games can now run PSP games natively after engineers at Google hacked it.

Andy Nguyen and Calle Svensson, two security researchers at Google, worked on the hack for over a month to get the hack working. The result: GTA Liberty City Stories running natively on the PS Portal. The engineers managed to run the PPSSPP emulator on the device, which is a popular solution for playing PSP games on Android, iOS, macOS and Linus. Given that the PS Portal runs on Android, you can see where the idea for the hack originated.

It’s an admirable feat that extracts more value out of the handheld device, which uses Remote Play to stream games from the PS5. The handheld has been widely ridiculed for its limited use, even after selling out multiple times at retail. As for whether Portal owners will be able to use this hack on their devices, Nguyen said that a release is still far off. “There's no release planned in the near future, and there's much more work to be done,” said Nguyen in a follow-up post. The hack doesn’t require any additional hardware, as Nguyen clarified that it is all “software based”.

Nguyen, who goes by the alias “theflow0” online, is well-known for exposing vulnerabilities on PlayStation consoles. This summer, Nguyen will be giving a talk on the PS4’s kernel vulnerabilities at TyphoonCon, an event that focuses on “offensive security issues such as vulnerability discovery, advanced exploitation techniques and reverse engineering.”

Sony has been rumored to be working on a new PlayStation handheld, which will reportedly be released alongside the PS6. Xbox is also rumored to be designing its own handheld machine, which could arrive as soon as this holiday season.

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The PlayStation Portal remote player is available for $299.