Developers eye PSP hacks

Keep your multiplayer racing games and widescreen movies. For some people, Sony's PlayStation Portable won't be really cool until it sports a command-line interface.

Hackers began with the PSP's wireless Internet connectivity and multimedia features pretty much the minute the gadget became available to the public. And now other groups of tweakers are dreaming of making their own software for the device.

The The PSP-Linux Project, still in the discussion phase, wants to port the open-source operating system to the gadget. The effort seems to be hampered for now by a resounding lack of knowledge on the hardware components and firmware purring away underneath the PSP's sleek chassis, but one can count on the hacker community for dogged persistence in pursuit of a dubious goal.

The PlayStation 2 development community, meanwhile, is lobbying for help from Sony, under the novel theory that if amateur developers have licensed tools from Sony, said developers won't be engaged in potentially copyright-compromising activities. Sounds like a long shot to us, but then Sony did provide PS2 tinkerers with their own version of Linux.