How about Remote Joy Lite? It allows you to port the display of the Custom Firmware PSP in Figure A to the monitor of your computer with nothing more than a USB cable.

FIGURE A


Sony's Playstation Portable gaming platform. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The joy
With Remote Joy Lite, the display of the PSP is sent to a PC monitor via the USB cord, where it can be displayed in a window or full-screen. A larger display can make it easier to see details that may otherwise be overlooked on the smaller screen of the PSP.

Remote Joy Lite can also be used to take screenshots and capture video of your gameplay, as in Figure B.

FIGURE B


Use Remote Joy Lite to take screenshots. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Remote Joy Lite will record your gameplay as an AVI file utilizing whatever codec you choose in the Settings menu, but a little tip... I found Xvid worked better than any other; and you really do want to use a method with compression, otherwise it will eat up your hard drive space rather quickly.

Now, audio will not be recorded through the USB cable; there is a way to get audio though. If you have a 3.5mm stereo patch cable with a male plug on each end, you can run the audio out from the headphone jack of the PSP to the audio in or microphone port of your computer and the audio will be captured in WAV format as the video is captured. And you'll want to use the LAME MP3 encoder for encoding the audio.

Remote Joy Lite will not join the audio and video together for you; that's asking a bit much. You'll need a utility such as VirtualDub to join the files together.

Installing Remote Joy Lite
In order to use Remote Joy Lite, your PSP will need to have custom firmware installed. A previous article in Computing Unplugged provided instructions on how to install a custom firmware, but you're on your own in locating the necessary files, as well as in locating Remote Joy Lite. A quick search on Google or Yahoo! will head you in the right direction.

Due to the underground nature of custom firmware and the applications that go with it, be sure to use caution when searching for the files, there are some nefarious characters out there who will disguise viruses and malware as useful utilities; we're providing this material for information purposes only.

The RemoteJoyLite.prx file needs to be installed to the SEPLUGINS directory of your Memory Stick, as shown in Figure C.

FIGURE C


Install the Remote Joy file to the SEPLUGINS folder. Roll over picture for a larger image.