While most of the coders out there work within the same circles, one of them seems to be standing on the outside, causing his own storm of sorts. External from most of the drama, StrmnNrmn is happily living in his own world, giving us one of the greatest homebrew emulator projects for the PSP: the Nintendo 64 emulator, Deadalus PSP. As a tribute to Daedalus' third year anniversary this month, here's your QuickGuide for reminiscing (or catching up!) on the life and times of StrmnNrmn so far. Strap into your seats, we're heading into the eye of the storm!

So we finally got the R2 version of Team Typhoon's ChicHEN exploit, and yes, homebrew is now most definitely enabled. Wondering what Dark AleX has planned? Or not planned, rather. Well, this doesn't come from DAX himself, but here's something close enough: webmaster Alek gives us updates on the ChickHEN exploit and clues us in on Team M33's plans.

The addition of classic PlayStation games to the PlayStation Store was a smart move. Not totally unexpected, but smart. There are still a lot of gamers out there who grew up on Sony's first gaming console and are itching to try their hand again on the games they grew up with. The problem is, the number of PS1 classics on the PlayStation Store is still depressingly low. If you still have your old PS1 game disc, though, you won't have to wait for your favorite games to show up on the PlayStation Store. All you need is a PSP.

Alright. So the latest official firmware for the PSP was released the other day, and most probably, some of you are waiting for Dark AleX to give us some feedback before we update our PSP units.

So, Bob, what's the damage? Is PSP FW 5.50 hackable?

Well, get a load of this! The latest firmware for the PSP will be going live tomorrow! Looks like Dark AleX might be pushed into creating a custom firmware for this because the PSP FW v5.50 system update has got some huge features packed into it: creating and viewing folders on the XMB, the addition of the XMB Information Board (kinda like the upper-right scrolling ticker box on the PS3), and a bunch of Internet browser additions. Changelog in the full article.

This little homebrew app from dev and QJ.NET forum member Light_AleX could prove useful to those who have different PSN accounts for each of the Network's supported regions. It lets you backup and restore your PSN licenses without having to connect your PSP to a PC, letting you switch to a different license without having to overwrite the current one.

Download: PSN License Manager v0.1
Visit: QJ.NET PSP Development forum

Another month has come and gone, and another batch of weekly features will now find themselves zipped up for your convenience. QuickGuide and How-To issues 4 through 8 (yes, it was a rather long month) are all here in this neat bundle.


Download: QJ QGuide March
Download: QJ How-To March

The week was a pretty good one for the PSP homebrew scene, punctuated by the release of a new iR Shell. It's not quite the uber cool "advanced multi-tasking" iR Shell just yet, but it does add a couple more features to an already awesome piece of 'brew. The release ratio was still skewed heavily towards the applications, but a couple of good homebrew games did get released as well. Let's get right on down to the rundown!

It's not quite that uber cool "advanced multi-tasking" iR Shell just yet, but here's a new version coming straight from AhMan. Think of this as an interim update. iR Shell v4.92 paves the way to incorporate support for Dark AleX's LEDA tool and RemoteJoy improvements.

Thanks to Fadil for the heads up!

Download: iR Shell v4.92

So you've seen the tutorials, you've read the basics... We'll make a side trip from all the technical (but noob-friendly) mumbo-jumbo, and slow down for a bit of a feature. Let's sneak into a topic that's a tad bit closer to our hearts: a "who's who" QuickGuide on one of the PSP homebrew scene's most celebrated developers. We know that he hardly needs any introduction, but are you sure you know him well enough? Join us as we take a look back at the life and times (so far!) of Dark AleX...