Joystiq Video: Joystiq Booth Babe Tour
Our very own Adams Briscoe toured around the E3 digs and grabbed a few interviews with some of the booth babes working the floor. Check the video out here. (3 minutes, 16.7MBs, iPod-compatible).
Read MoreC.K. Sample, III
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Stories By C.K. Sample, III
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Joystiq Video: Wired Spore Event, featuring Will Wright and Robin Williams [update 3]
Last night, Randall Bennett and I had the good fortune to attend a special Wired event featuring Will Wright showing off his next masterpiece, Spore, with a wonderful guest appearance by Robin Williams. We managed to get footage of the entire event and we even scored interviews with both Wright and Williams. Thanks to everyone over at Wired for inviting us! In the interest of getting this to you as soon as possible, we've uploaded the full 40 minute, 420MB file, which you can access via this link: [link]. Please right-click and save the file locally before viewing. It's 480x360 3ivx wrapped in Quicktime and should play nicely on your video-capable iPod, should you own one. If you feel like waiting a bit and think that 420MBs is ginormous, then give us about an hour and we'll update this post with some separate chapter-sized versions of the video. Enjoy!Get the video[Huge] Get the full enchilada[Cutdown1] Get the first 10 minutes (Will Wright introducing character creation) [Cutdown2] Get the next 10. [Cutdown3] Get the following 10. [Cutdown4] Get the final 10. Update: Someone was kind enough to make a torrent: [link].
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Spore figurines at E3
Randall Bennett and I got a nice little sneak peak at Spore last night at Wired Magazine's presentation featuring Will Wright and guest starring Robin Williams. We shot some great video that will be up on the site as soon as it's ready. We also managed to get a private screening of the game thanks to the people at EA Games. Randall will be doing a full write-up of the game play experience later today, but I just wanted to share one little cool thing in the room where they hosted the preview: Figurines of creatures different Spore designers built in the game and then printed out as three dimensional models (like the guy pictured above). Check below the jump for more pics...
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Reader insight into hacking the RSS Channel
I knew turning my previous findings over to the collective mind of the Internets would yield quick results. PSP Fanboy reader g.wygonik commented here and here with the bits I was missing while gazing at the binary CHLIST file in a text editor. Make sure you read his comments, and hopefully, we'll see something from him soon, as he notes: "that's it. pretty easy to make an app to do this. but it's late and i need sleep." Cool. If you whip something up, let us know via our tips form and we'll post about it here.
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Trying to hack the RSS Channel
One thing we here at PSP Fanboy find frustrating about the RSS Channel feature on version 2.6 of the firmware is that you can only add podcasts via the PSP's built in web-browser. So we thought we'd try to hack our way in so that we can add our own feeds at will. Unfortunately, this is proving a tad bit more difficult than we originally thought. Until we crack it wide open, we thought we'd share our findings to date with you to see if anyone out there surfing around the wilds of the Internets could figure it out. Mount your Memory Stick Duo on your computer and navigate to the SYSTEM folder. Inside this folder are the BROWSER and RSSCH folders. The RSSCH is the new creature that belongs to RSS Channel. Inside this folder is another folder called CHANNELS. Here you will find any image files (feel free to replace a few of them with images of the same size and format and with the same name, in effect customizing the look of your podcasts) that are associated with the RSS files to which you've subscribed and a file called CHLIST. If you crack open CHLIST in a text editor like pico you'll see that there are some basic flags before each bit of data that the PSP uses to find the podcast. Unfortunately, simply replicating this data around the information of the feeds you want to add doesn't appear to work. A file shows up in the list, but it is empty of information and fails to connect. I tried just replacing the URL on one of the working feeds with no luck. I tried editing in a hex editor, too. The PSP would seem to take the text of a valid RSS 2.0 feed, scrape it for the enclosure information, and then compile that text into the CHLIST file, which appears to be a binary. Now we just need to figure out how it does this and how to crack it.
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PSP Fanboy Flickr group
In case you missed mention of it at the end of my earlier post, we've set up a PSP Fanboy Flickr group for you, our readers, to use and enjoy. So far, it's kind of lonely over there, so sign up for a free Flickr account, if you don't already have one, join up with the group, and start submitting your PSP-related pictures to our pool.We'll try to feature some of the choice pics submitted on the site from time to time.
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How to take pictures of your PSP
PSP Fanboy reader, and well-known writer on the Internets, Dave Taylor writes in to ask us: "I'm wondering if any of you fanboy folk have any bright ideas about how to take decent quality screenshots of our favorite consumer electronics gizmo, the PSP? I've tried a bunch of different approaches with my Nikon digital SLR but none of them work worth beans." Fortunately for Dave, and for all of our wonderful readers, I just finished putting together a book on the PSP, and while working on that project, I spent many hours of trial and error to discover the best way to take decent quality screenshots of the PSP. I'll try my best to cover the best ways to get a full shot of the PSP, as well as the best way to zero in on that gorgeous screen. Read the rest after the jump...
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Poll: Is Firmware 2.6 buggy for you?
PSP Fanboy reader Ryan writes in asking if the 2.6 firmware has some bugs. He notes, "I installed it just fine and then added the wma support which seemed to go just fine. I transferred a bunch of wma songs over as i have done many times with the mp3 format. The songs play fine until you try to skip forward (cue) through a song. Doing this seems to immediately lock up the PSP. The only way to stop it is forcing a restart buy holding the power switch off for a good 7-8 seconds till it powers off or to remove the battery. Then you restart. I was able to repeat this 'lock up' every time and on different songs in different folders." Has anybody else seen this? What about any other bugs since the firmware update? I've had the Browser crash on me not once, but three different times when I was trying to load Yahoo!'s podcasting service to grab a few items for RSS Channel. This wasn't a light crash either. Each time, my entire PSP rebooted. Not cool.
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Does the PSP's approach to podcasting break podcasting?
I upgraded one of my PSPs to version 2.6 of the firmware last night and have been toying with the RSS Channel features of the device. It's definitely cool to be able to stream audio off of the Internet to your PSP with very little buffering problems and without stealing any of the precious real estate on your Memory Stick. I still would like to see some streaming video option that didn't entail forking over the loot for a LocationFree system. Russell Beattie is right, streaming Rocketboom and my other favorite videocasts to the PSP would be very nice. However, at the same time I was enjoying the new RSS Channel features, I was thinking about how inherently wrong it is to be streaming podcasts. I mean, the whole point of podcasts is to be able to carry them around with you, and while the PSP is definitely portable, an active Internet connection isn't always as portable, and, as a result, I'm unable to listen to the RSS Channels while I'm on the go. Plus, downloading the podcast once to an RSS reader or iTunes takes up less bandwidth from the podcasters than streaming sections of it each time you want to rewind or need to listen to a podcast again. So what do you think? Is the PSP's approach to podcasting breaking podcasting?
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FLiXPO: Video content for your PSP
Looking for some video content to stick on your Memory Stick Duo and watch while on the go? Check out FLiXPO, a site with "funny videos, movie trailers, and funny commercials." All videos come in both iPod and PSP-ready variants and they even offer the chance for you to share your own videos with the world. The site is brought to you by PiXPO, which looks to be a free Windows application for converting your videos into a variety of formats, including those that are playable by your PSP. [via TUAW]
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480x270 video with Firmware 2.6
Engadget just posted this tidbit about the new firmware that I had missed: it now allows for playing of video at 480x270. This largely has to do with an announcement by Sony yesterday that they would be launching a new version of PortableTV, a PSP-centric video distribution service in Japan, which is compatible with the PSP's browser. What's more the videos are H.264 at 480x270 (Yay!) and shrouded in a dark net of DRM coding (Boo!).
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Poll: PSP titles you'd like to see
So far, we have quite a list of favorite PSP titles developing, but our second most commented post is this one, which asks if the PSP is taking a beating from the Nintendo DS. The majority of respondents seem to think that the DS is owning the PSP in the game department. So, with that information, here's your chance to let Sony and the PSP game developers out there know what kinds of titles and features you're hungry for in the PSP gaming arena. Let us know in the comments and in a couple of days, I'll try to whip up a follow-up post with the top 5 or so requested bits in the PSP gaming arena.
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Russell Beattie looks at the new PSP firmware
Mobile blogger extraordinaire, Russell Beattie, upgraded his PSP Firmware to 2.6 and has posted a hands-on first impression of the new functionalities on his blog. If any of you non-homebrewers out there are wondering about the upgrade, you might want to look over what Russell has written. One part that I found interesting was a slight fault he finds with the PSP's new RSS capabilities (which are really all about podcasting). Russell notes, "Alright, that was fun. Now when do we get Video support? Seems like a huge missed opportunity! :-) And honestly, Ive got a 1GB memory stick in this bad boy, so itd be nice to have the option to download the files as well. Streaming is nice and convenient, but downloading is pretty useful." Is it just me, or does it seem like Sony is trying to play catch up with the iPod and the iTMS with this recent addition of podcasting support? If so, I think Russell is right. They're lagging behind a bit.
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Poll: What's your favorite PSP title to date?
Hey, PSP fanboys and fangirls, I have a question for you: What's your absolute favorite PSP game to date? I have to say being a longtime fan of Blizzard's Diablo, early on, I was enthralled with Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade. Unfortunately, no matter how hard I hacked it, I couldn't get it to play multiplayer nicely over Xlink Kai, so I lost interest. Since then, I've bounced between favorites. Of course, I love Wipeout Pure! I've always loved the Wipeout series and the nice little browser that can be easily tricked into regular browsing on my 1.50 firmware homebrew system really makes this one of the must-haves for the PSP. Speaking of homebrew, I think I know my favorite game on the PSP: Chris Bowron's pspChess, which is a port of BCE to the PSP. What's your favorite?
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Serve your iTunes Library to your PSP via WiFi
Sure you can use your PSP as an iTunes remote, but what you might not know is that you can also serve your iTunes Library to your PSP via WiFi using Dot-Tunes on OS X. Dot-Tunes offers all your iTunes music up via a web-interface that you can navigate using the browser that's included with 2.0 and above firmware. Then you can either remotely control your iTunes, stream the music to your PSP, or download the individual songs to your PSP. Of course, downloading to the PSP only works with PSP-compatible songs, so tracks bought via the iTMS or encoded in AAC format won't work. If you're on Windows, don't fret, as they have a version for you too. Dot-Tunes runs $29 Australian.
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