I’m not much of a gamer (unless you count occasional bouts of Quake III, Portal or Counter Strike), but I do own one of those oldfangled handheld consoles, i.e., the PlayStation Portable. It was my eternal seventh-grade dream to own a GameBoy Advance; I finally realized it three years ago by buying a PSP instead and promptly spent the subsequent three years not purchasing a single game for the platform.

Today, I salvaged it from the drawer it had been kept hidden in, discovered a depressing growth of mould on the analog stick, charged it thanks to a certain someone, and finally decided to take the plunge and try to install custom firmware on it (if you have no idea what that means, I suppose it’s something like jailbreaking an iPhone). In the days of yore, one had to do all kinds of complicated things involving things with names like “Pandora battery” and feverishly crossed fingers so it’s not too surprising that that – combined with the fact that my cutting-edge PSP couldn’t even be modded in the first place – prevented me from blemishing its internal pristinity.

Then yesterday I decided to take a look at How Things Stood in the mire of modded PSPs and, lo and behold! it can now be accomplished in the astronomical number of three short steps which took me all of half a minute to complete.

The result, you ask? Witness my magnum opus (for the day, that is):

The GameBoy obsessions of my younger self are purely coincidental, but yes, I spent my day playing old Nintendo GBA games on a not-so-old Sony PSP. The mind, it boggles.

PS: Does anyone know how to incinerate mould so I may never again have to groan in irked displeasure every time I see something of mine that I haven’t used in a while?