MediaBox Blog

I had been playing with the idea of controlling the MediaBox using my PSP for some time now. So I sat down and decided to take the plunge and give it a go. And this is what I have so far

Download PSP Remote v0.1

Follow up:

I came across the pspsdk/toolchain from the http://ps2dev.org site. It's an excellent piece of kit developed by the open source community. The guys and gals that contribute to this are accomplishing this without official documentation and it's all based from hard work reverse engineering the firmware on the PSP, so hats off to them. There is an official PSP SDK, but since Sony charge quite of sum of money to get it, this kinda hinders it's use with the open source / hobbyist developer.

There is one downside to using the open source SDK. Since version 1.5 of the official PSP firmware, each EBOOT.PBP (PSP executable) is checked when it's executed that it was created using the official SDK, and if it's not, it does not execute. You can get around this problem using various methods from using the Kexploit hack to loading custom firmware on your PSP. I wont describe how to setup any of these since it's not in the scope of this article, but there are plenty of resources on the web on how this can be done. My personal favourite is loading a custom firmware onto the PSP (I decided to go with the M33 firmware by Dark_AleX).

So now onto the good stuff, my initial thoughts for the PSP remote controller were to include the following features

• Control the mouse with the PSP analog stick
• Simulate left/right mouse clicks with PSP buttons
• Similate keyboard presses with remaining buttons
• Use PSP screen to display menu to send further keys/advanced commands to PC
• Wake up the MediaBox using Wake on Lan from the PSP

I am glad to say that I have developed the first version of the PSP Remote software. With this first version I have managed to include features 1,2 and 3. The mouse movements could do with some fine tuning but other than that, it's totally functional. The server component is currently Linux based, but I have already started work on supporting Windows machines for those of you who are Microsoft users. Here are the button mappings.

• Square - Left mouse click
• Cross - Right mouse click
• Circle - Keyboard enter key
• Up - Keyboard up
• Down - Keyboard down
• Left - Keyboard left
• Right - Keyboard right

As the software matures, each button action will be configurable to any key on the keyboard using a configuration file, but for now the button mappings are hard coded.

The software has two components. A client component which runs on the PSP, and a server component that runs on the MediaBox (Ubuntu in this case). The client/server components communicate via TCP using the Wifi connection on the PSP (which means you need a valid WLAN access point configured on your PSP) and whatever LAN connection you have present on your PC. You can download a pre-compiled version of the PSP client and server here. The pre-compiled version of the PSP client is compatible with firmwares 3.7 and higher and the pre-compiled server is compatible with Ubuntu 8.04 x86. Once the code matures a bit more I will release details for SVN/Trac access

The PSP client needs to have a config.ini file present within the same directory as the EBOOT.PBP with one line in the file containing the host/IP address of the server machine to connect to.

Installing the EBOOT.PBP will be different depending on what method you have chosen to load homebrew PSP applications. I will describe what is needed on mine. I have loaded the M33 4.01 firmware on my fat PSP. An official PSP game will load games/apps from the memory stick from the /PSP/GAME/appname folder. With the M33 firmware there are other game folders where it looks too, /PSP/GAME150 and /PSP/GAME4XX.

/PSP/GAME150
This folder is for homebrew apps that have been compiled for 1.5 firmwares. The custom firmware will load the apps in a 1.5 compatibility mode

/PSP/GAME4XX
This folder is for homebrew apps that have been compiled for firmwares above 3, so this is where you would install the PSP Remote application, for example

/PSP/GAME4XX/pspremote/EBOOT.PBP

So there you go, here is the first version of PSP Remote and most certainly won't be the last. So keep tuned for the latest and greatest features and let me know of other ideas that you may have.