PlayStation Portal has been hacked by Andy Nguyen, more popularly known as TheFlow0, and his coworker Calle Svensson. Nguyen is a cloud vulnerability researcher at Google and Svensson is a Security Engineer there. Nguyen tweeted the news on X with a picture of the device running Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories through PPSSPP.
How is it possible?
PlayStation Portal is already running Android out of the box, at least a very locked-down version. The two Google engineers were able to do a total software side hack and are now able to run APKs on the device through which they installed PPSSPP. It is also important to note that while the device does not have a dedicated graphics chip since it is only meant for streaming, the device of course still has a SoC which can run some less taxing games without having to stream them.
Nguyen is a very famous PlayStation hacker who has used kernel exploits to jailbreak different consoles/handhelds like the PlayStation Vita, and PlayStation 4 and also recently accessed the debug menu of PlayStation 5 to decrypt the console’s firmware.
What can the PlayStation Portal play?
Nguyen mentioned in one of his replies that the onboard memory on the device is 6 GB. Aside from that Kotaku reported that Svensson revealed to them that Minecraft and Tekken 6 were also tried on the Portal. According to him, both games work well with the “PPSSPP emulator playing very smoothly with 2x resolution and 100 percent speed”. This means that the Portal should be more than capable of running other emulators for GBA, and DS games considering it is running on Android. The PlayStation Vita is widely regarded as a great emulation machine after it was discarded by Sony themselves but that might change with the Portal.
When can we jailbreak the PlayStation Portal?
TheFlow0 mentioned that no release is planned in the near future since there is still a ton of work left, with Svensson saying that it “would definitely be fun to share with the community but we’ll see”. We will soon be seeing some videos of the jailbreak device according to both. It should be noted that TheFlow0 has previously released exploits to the public so it can be expected that the software exploit for the PlayStation Portal will also be released after a few months.
We hope that the PlayStation Portal getting hacked will stop the device from becoming e-waste and also allow the handheld to run games natively instead of streaming them constantly.
In other Sony news, PlayStation’s latest release, Helldivers 2, is doing great with around 400k concurrent players on Steam! Check out our beginner’s guide to fighting for liberty and democracy if you’d be interested.
