Variations On A Theme: Console Follow-Ups

This blog post references my design feature, 'Variations on a theme: Handheld game systems proliferate, touting varied features and price tags' in the January 19, 2006 issue of EDN.

My article's still (as far as I can tell) quite up-to -date as I write this blog post, two days before the article appears in print and online. One notable exception, however, concerns the Sony PlayStation Portable's 'hack' status. In the online sidebar to the article, which I wrote in mid-November and finalized in mid-December, I wrote that no conclusive circumvention of firmware versions 2.01, 2.5 and 2.6 had occurred, although ideas of how to accomplish hacks (followed by rumours of hacks) had begun to circulate around the Internet. Well, just one week ago the first example of a homebrew application (Tetris) that you can run on any PSP firmware revision was released to the public. It exploits a vulnerability in the game-save feature of the PSP title Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories. How long will it take Sony and/or the title's developer, Rockstar Games, to respond? We'll have to wait and see….