Do you love your PSP?

If you think you have the chops to code your own app for the PSP, this tips will show you where to get started.

Do you love your PSP?, but you're disappointed that it doesn't have a program for easily viewing all of your recipes? A paint-by-numbers program? An advanced statistical analysis tool? A PSP port of Snood? Why not code your own application?

Unfortunately, the buy-in price to be a Sony-certified programmer for the PSP is a bit beyond most of us mere mortals, so the only real way to get into coding for the PSP is to dive right in to the homebrew scene. Fortunately, there's lots of very valuable information online for the would-be PSP coder, and there's a very active community of other coders working away in their free time to make the PSP a vibrant homebrew platform.

Homebrew applications can't be loaded on a PSP without some trickery, and it's a given that the most recent (2.0, as of this writing) version of the firmware is immune to such trickery. So, if you want to run true homebrew applications, you're going to need to make sure that you get your hands on a PSP running Version 1.0 or 1.5 of the firmware. If you're a cracking savant, however, please by all means figure out a way to run homebrew on later firmware versionsthe Internet will herald your name far and wide.

But, if you're not inclined to invoke the trickery needed to load homebrew, you're running the latest firmware, or you just want to do some elementary programming, you're not out of luck. The PSP web browser is powered by JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, the technologies that come together to give you Dynamic HTML (DHTML). With these, you can write some simple and attractive applications that run right on your PSP's web browser.