Sony's PlayStation Portal Gets Hacked And Is Proven To Run Emulated PSP Games

The recently launched PlayStation Portal lets gamers wirelessly stream games from their PS5 via Wi-Fi. Despite initial skepticism about its utility, reviews have generally been favorable. Now, just a few months post-release, the device has been successfully hacked, allowing local play of PSP games without the need for a network connection.

If you're intrigued by this development and want to delve into the details of how it was accomplished and the potential implications for the device's future, continue reading. In the following sections, we will explore the recent news buzz regarding the PlayStation Portal being hacked to support emulated PSP games.

Sony's Playstation Portal Gets Hacked And Is Proven To Run Emulated PSP Games

Whenever a new device hits the market, hackers and engineers immediately dive into it, checking for any vulnerabilities and backdoors that allow for additional features. After only "a month of hard work," hacker/cloud vulnerability researcher at Google, Andy Nguyen aka TheFloW, has confirmed that he, along with a few other engineers at Google, have hacked the PlayStation Portal.

As seen in the tweet above, the device has been hacked to run the PPSSPP emulator, enabling it to run PSP games natively (GTA 3 in the image above) without connecting to any online services or networks. This is even more impressive because the hack was reportedly done solely through software, and no hardware trickery or exploits were used.

This ultimately means that if the hack/mod is made available in the future, it can be done far more easily via software, rather than having to physically alter or tamper with the device. Sadly, however, Nguyen has stated that “There’s no release planned in the near future, and there’s much more work to be done,” explained Nguyen in a reply to the original post on X.

Of course, this is ultimately great news for the future of the device and the platform itself since players will be able to get much more utility and ultimately, value, out of the Portal (which was a huge concern when it first came out). Be it via PSP emulation or possibly even other emulators for Android games, the offline/hacked mods would change the landscape for this handheld device, and we look forward to seeing how it develops in the future.