Tips and Tricks

Here some useful tips for developing for the PSP.

Making Programs Work on Unmodded PSPs

The PSPDEV toolchain contains tools for making your program work on unmodded PSPs. This can be done by running psp-cmake with some additional commands when building like so:

mkdir build && cd build

psp-cmake -DBUILD_PRX=1 -DENC_PRX=1 .. && make

This does require create_pbp_file to be used in your CMakeLists.txt file. After the first build, running make is enough to get an EBOOT.PBP file which works on official firmware with any new changes made to the code.

Add PSP Specific Code to a Multi-Platform Programs

When porting a game to the PSP, some PSP specific code might be needed. To make this code only apply to PSP, it is possible to use a simple ifdef statements which checks for __PSP__ like so:

#ifdef __PSP__
    // Do PSP specific thing
#else
    // Do the thing all other systems should do
#endif

This makes sure that the other systems supported by the program keeps working the same, while still making it possible to add support for the PSP.

Managing Libraries

There are many C and C++ libraries available within the PSPDEV toolchain and most of them will be installed by default. Libraries are where most of the updates within the toolchain happen and they can be updated manually without redownload the toolchain using psp-pacman.

Updating the libraries installed can be done with the following command:

psp-pacman -Syu

After updating, you can list all available libraries with the following command:

psp-pacman -Sl

For a full list with information on each library, it’s easiest to take a look on the repository’s web pages.

Installing a library can be done with the following command:

psp-pacman -S library

Managing Licenses

Every project made with the PSPDEV toolchain will import at least some libraries, each with their own license. Everything bundled is free to use, but some libraries will ask you to share their license with your project or in rare cases give users access to your code to respect their licenses. The psp-create-license-directory tool can be used to easily collect the licenses that apply to your project, so you can comply with them and ship them with your project.

To create a directory with a copy of the licenses that are always used in project made with the PSPDEV toolchain use the following command:

psp-create-license-directory

For any library you added, for example sdl2 or jsoncpp, you can add the licenses by adding the library names to the command:

psp-create-license-directory sdl2 jsoncpp

If you’re not sure what the library you used is called exactly, you can use the -l option to list the installed libraries:

psp-create-license-directory -l

Updating the Toolchain

A new version of the PSPDEV toolchain is released at least once a month, so updating should be done regularly if you want to benefit from new features and bug fixes.

To update the toolchain, simply follow the installation instruction for your system on the Installation page. Installing the dependencies can be skipped.