PlayStation Portable hardware
Use of the drive increases battery drain by approximately 10% and the system has been criticized for having very slow data transfer speeds, translating into load times of more than two minutes in total for some games.
Despite its movie and music playback capabilities, the PSP has primarily gaming-oriented controls (as opposed to the controls typical to television remotes or MP3 players): two shoulder buttons (L and R), the PlayStation, start and select buttons, a digital 4-directional pad, and an analog 'nub' which is slid rather than tilted.
A sleep mode is also available that uses minimal battery power to keep the system's RAM active, allowing for "instant on" functionality.
During the 2005 GDC, Sony revealed that it had capped the PSP's CPU clock speed at 222 MHz for licensed software.
Various homebrew tools enable users to operate at 333 MHz, generally leading to a higher frame rate at the expense of battery life.
On June 22, 2007, Sony Computer Entertainment confirmed that the firmware version 3.50 does in fact remove this restriction and allows future games to run at the full 333 MHz speed.
The eDRAM (embedded DRAM) memory was manufactured by Toshiba in a 3D system-in-package chip with two integrated circuit (IC) dies stacked vertically.
[4][5] The 166 MHz graphics chip has 2 MiB embedded memory and through its 512 bit interface provides hardware polygon rendering, 16bit Depth Buffer, Bézier Surfaces, Bézier Curves, B-Splines, hardware directional per-vertex lighting, Bloom, Motion Blur, Gouraud Shading, Cel Shading, culling, mipmapping, LOD, clipping, Lightmapping, environment mapping, Render to Texture, shadow mapping, shadow volumes, environment projection and perspective-correct texture mapping, texture compression, tessellation, Hardware Transform and Lighting (T&L), fogging, alpha blending, alpha, depth and stencil tests, transparency effects, post-processing effects, vertex blending for morphing effects, and dithering, all in 16 or 24 bit color.
This allows 2–16 players with PSPs to create a local, ad hoc network for multiplayer gameplay; or to connect to the Internet via an Internet-connected Wi-Fi router.
The port is absent from the new PSP Slim redesign, probably due to the lack of any official software that utilised it.
The PSP's main menu allows the user to configure the system for use across the Internet or an intranet via a wireless connection, known as infrastructure mode.
South Korean PSPs have shipped with software providing web browsing and multimedia streaming features, but only through company-owned Wi-Fi hot spots, and with a monthly fee.
[9] Use of infrastructure networks in PSP software began with a small number of titles at the U.S. launch, supporting online play.
The RSS features allow the user to download video web feeds or listen to podcasts from websites.
Sony's LocationFree Player allows users to stream live television broadcasts (or other video content) to their PSP, within their Wi-Fi network, or remotely via the Internet.
Such "gameshare" versions of titles usually have their feature set reduced because of technical limitations (small RAM size, slow bandwidth of 802.11b connection).
