Wombat Mobile I should be coding or sleeping instead of this...

Yahoo! My PSP can browse the web!

I saw something interesting on the PSP msgboards yesterday. It was a recap of a chat between PSP fanboys and a guy from PlayStation.

xJoshx: There have been rumors about the next update haveing a web browser and an email client included in it, is there any truth in this. If this is true when should we be expecting this update, and will the cost be free?

John Koller: To xJoshx: There will be several firmware updates to address upcoming changes. The cost for firmware updates will be free. Wipeout Pure actually has a browser embedded in the code, but you are only able to access their downloadable content page - which will go live within the next 1-2 months.

Hmmm, well if the folks at Wipeout aren't going to use their browser for 1-2 months, and Sony is taking their time with a browser firmware update, then I guess it's up to the users.

So I explored the browser built into Wipeout a little more. I downloaded a freeware proxy called FreeProxy from and installed it on my laptop with these settings.

I changed the network settings on my PSP to still use DHCP for everything, but set it to use a proxy, setting the proxy to my laptop's IP address(192.168.0.100).

Then I fired up Wipeout Pure on my PSP and went to the "Download" option, and the activity was logged by the proxy.

[**UPDATE** As Zidewinder points out, you don't need the following step, so just skip it. Instead, just modify your /etc/hosts file to point to the right place]
[SKIP]
Next I downloaded a DNS program and installed it on my laptop. TreeWalk DNS (Free for personal use) at http://www.ntcanuck.com/. I setup a zone for scea.com to point to my server instead of the real one and changed my laptop to use the newly installed local DNS.

scea.com.   	IN      A       192.168.0.100
ingame		IN      A       192.168.0.100

Then I whipped some jsp and html pages together to handle making http connections in the background using java.net.URLConnection. I'm using the pages on my laptop locally, but you can get an idea of the pages from the copies that I put here: http://www.wombatmobile.com/wipeout/index.html

That's pretty much it. Here's the summary:

1. PSP uses my laptop as a proxy for http connections
2. my laptop runs its own DNS where everything is the same, except ingame.scea.com points to a webserver on the laptop.
3. http requests from the PSP get sent to the laptop and the jsp pages on my local server make URLConnections to the outside world.

Here are some more pics. Wow, these came out worse than I expected. The bright screen make them look photoshop'd, but these are genuine. If you don't believe me, I can send you a bunch more. Feel free to setup a proxy for your own PSP and give it a try.

News for mobile Nerds.

Blogs turn out to be some of the best sites to view on the PSP. I guess an appropriate caption for the next pic in the current vernacular would be:

w00t! Scoble pwnz PSP

Did I get that right? I just don't grok this hepcat lingo.

I hope Sony comes out with the real browser soon, but until then I'll probably make some improvements to this process and make it easier for other to setup. Anything to help PSP fanboys conduct "research" on the web for their homework. :)

[Update #1]: If you want to try this, there's a much simpler method now to try it without installing anything. It's really quick. Check out:
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/jterlesk/psp/

[Update #2]: Wow, lots of people reading this. If you're coming to this site for the first time, there's followup commentary at my blog's main page:
http://wombatmobile.com/blog