A recent article posted on MSNBC (via the Washington Post) claims that homebrew communities blend hackers and gamers together in an effort to make the most out of their devices, saying that "Independent programmers are working on ways to listen to Internet radio and wirelessly check e-mail through the handheld Nintendo DS game device. Elsewhere, some jokers figured out how to get a playable version of Doom onto the iPod.". The article says that rip-offs of games such as Lumines, which appeared on the GBA as LumineSweeper when it wasn't released for the GBA, are regular occurrences in the homebrew community basically stating that many homebrew games are illegal.

The article goes on to the PSP, claiming that the PSP homebrew scene was "nearly dead" until the 2.5/2.6 downgrader was released. Obviously this writer, Mike Musgrove, hadn't done his research. Before the downdater was released more and more games were being made available on firmwares 2.0-2.5 with Fanjita's eLoader, and still loads of games and applications were being developed for firmware 1.5. I'm afraid the PSP homebrew scene was far from 'nearly dead', it was growing.

One thing the writer did get correct is this "if any recent game title for the Sony device has generated as much excitement online as this underground developer's announcement, I missed it.". That is correct. I bought my PSP to play games on it, and didn't even think about homebrew until a friend told me about this site about a week after getting my PSP on the UK launch date. And since I've been into homebrew, no UMD game release has really tickled my fancy apart for GTA:Liberty City Stories, which lasted a while.

The writer then moves onto the subject of the up and coming Xbox 360 homebrew/hacking scene which is in it's infancy. "Console makers dislike this sort of tinkering because it opens the door to piracy. The same tricks that make an Xbox more functional to power users are the same tricks that override the controls put into place to keep users from playing illegally copied versions of games."

This is also correct, but when you spend your hard-earned cash on a product, you want to get the most out of it, and this is what the writer seems to have missed out on. I have definitely had my money's worth from my PSP, because of homebrew. If I didn't own a PSP I probably wouldn't be writing this now, and this site wouldn't be as big as it is today. Homebrew helps us to use what we own in a way that the makers of it couldn't even think of. Homebrewers don't make money out of what they do, they do it for the programming experience and to get more out of their consoles. There aren't any big corporations trying to take your cash from you in the homebrew scene, and that's the beauty of it.

In other news, the article seems to have gone missing from the MSNBC website. Why this is, we are not sure, but all I can get is the "page not found" error. Either they have server problems (highly unlikely for MSNBC) or they have removed it. Whatever the issue, they cannot escape Google Cache!

Link: [Original MSNBC article] Page not found error
Link: [Google Cache version]
Link: [Original Washington Post article]