psp5

Made by Mille Weber

I love the PSP, but going back to the XMB after using a PS5 always feels a bit dated. So I built psp5: a launcher for the PSP that tries to recreate the look and feel of the PS5 user interface – the row of game tiles at the top, the big artwork filling the screen behind them, the clean dark settings pages – on a 480×272 screen from 2004.

psp5 runs on PSPs with the ARK-4 or ARK-5 custom firmware (PSP-1000, 2000, 3000 and the PSP Go). You can start it like any other homebrew, or let it take over as ARK's own launcher so your PSP boots straight into it.

Everything you see is drawn by psp5 itself. No logos, icons, sounds or other assets from Sony are used – it's my own take on that style.

Settings	Performance

psp5 starts the way a PS5 does: a small grey logo on black, a short health notice over large, dark blue out-of-focus circles, then golden dust that swirls up and a warm spotlight from the top left before your games fade in – with a soft, airy sound underneath. It plays when the PSP starts and when it wakes up from sleep, but not when you come back from a game. Any button skips it, and you can turn it off in settings. The logo is psp5's own and everything is drawn and synthesized in code – no borrowed logos or sounds.

Then you get your games in a row along the top. The selected one is large with a thin light frame around it, and its artwork fades in behind everything. Your PSP games (ISO, CSO, ZSO and DAX) live under Games together with PSN and PS1 titles, and homebrew sits under Apps – flip between them with L and R. Is a homebrew game sitting under Apps? Press □ on it for its options and choose Move to Games (and back again), and psp5 remembers it. A UMD in the drive shows up first under Games, and it appears or disappears as soon as you put a disc in or take it out. Games and Apps are sorted by name. Press □ on a game to change the order: Sort switches between name, Like the XMB (including an order you set with Homebrew Sorter), Recently played and Custom. Move lifts the game so you can move it left or right with ← → (✕ when you are done), and Pin to front keeps a game first in the row. Next to them is the Library: everything you have, games and apps together, in a grid that's easy to scan through. Press □ there to sort by name or by what you added most recently.

The last tab is Music, like the music player in the XMB: it lists the MP3 files in ms0:/MUSIC (folders too) with their titles and artists, and keeps playing while you browse your games. The track that's playing shows up as a little note at the top of the other tabs. "Now playing" shows the album art – from the MP3 itself or a cover.jpg / folder.jpg in the album folder – and holding ← or → seeks through the track (the longer you hold, the faster it goes).

Pressing ✕ (or START) starts the game the same way ARK's own menu does, so updates, patched ISOs and PS1 games all work. Before a game launches psp5 shuts itself down completely and frees all of its memory, so the game gets the whole PSP.

Press △ for the settings, laid out like the PS5's settings pages. From there you can change ARK's CFW options (CPU speed, extra memory, caches, USB charging and so on), turn plugins on and off, connect over USB, restart, shut down, jump to the XMB or open ARK's recovery menu.

A few other things I cared about:

• It's quick. Only the tiles near your selection are loaded, in the background, and all artwork is cached as small ready-made textures, so after the first start it opens almost instantly.
• It has sounds. Soft ticks when you move around, a swipe between tabs and a little chord when a game starts. I synthesize them in code, so there are no audio files – you can listen to them in docs/sounds/, or turn them off in settings.
• It speaks your language. psp5 follows the PSP's system language: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian and Japanese. Swedish is there too – the PSP itself doesn't offer Swedish, so you pick it under Settings → psp5 → Language.
• It has themes. Settings → Theme has the colours of the PS5 console covers (Midnight Black, Cosmic Red, Nova Pink, Starlight Blue, Galactic Purple, Volcanic Red, Cobalt Blue, Sterling Silver and the Chroma colours), and – like the PS5's own Appearance setting – the look of the PS1, PS2, PS3 and PS4: the grey console with its button symbols, the dark towers and glowing orbs, the XMB wave and the blue PS4 waves. Highlight a theme to preview it and press ✕ to use it. You can also turn the game art in the background off, so the theme is always visible – or pick a wallpaper of your own: any JPEG or PNG in PICTURE (the XMB's Photo folder) under Settings → Theme → Wallpaper.
• It can preview games like the XMB. Turn on Settings → psp5 → Game previews, and when you rest on a game its short video (ICON1.PMF) plays inside the tile and its music (SND0.AT3) plays in the background – for games that have them. It's off by default.
• It keeps the list tidy. The same game twice (same game ID and title, for example as both ISO and CSO) shows up once; turn Hide duplicates off in the psp5 settings to see every copy. Square PSP minis icons are centred instead of stretched.
• It shows the volume. Press the volume buttons anywhere in psp5 and a PS5-style bar slides in at the top, with the level and a crossed-out speaker when the sound is off. While the PSP charges, the battery icon fills up in a loop next to a little lightning bolt. Settings → psp5 → Battery can also show the percentage or the time left next to it.
• It has a file manager, like ARK's own launcher: Settings → Power and USB → File manager. Browse the Memory Stick (and the internal storage on a PSP Go), mark files with □, and copy, move, rename or delete them or make a new folder from the △ menu. Copying shows a progress bar and can be cancelled with ○, and deleting always asks first.
• It has categories. Put games in folders – ISO/<folder>/ or PSP/GAME/<folder>/<game>/ – and press SELECT to pick one. Start a folder name with g_ to put everything in it under Games (for example PSP/GAME/g_GBA for GBA games packed as EBOOTs) or with s_ for Apps; the prefix isn't shown. A bg.png in the folder is shown behind it in the picker. The active category shows up in the tab name ("Games · GBA"). A folder with a single game (one folder per game) is not a category unless it has one of the prefixes.
• It has a Control Center. HOME opens a PS5-style panel with sleep, USB, the file manager, settings, the XMB, restart and power off. Settings → Power and USB can also turn the screen off and put the PSP to sleep after a while without a button press (not while music is playing).
• It shows the game's logo (PIC0) under the selected game, and the background art (PIC1) in full resolution.
• It remembers where you were – after a game, psp5 opens on the same tab, category and game.
• It can show your pictures. Press ✕ on a JPEG or PNG in the file manager to view it (← → for the next one) and ✕ again to use it as the wallpaper.
• It never touches flash0, and you can always get back to the normal XMB.

Everything you need to get psp5 onto your PSP – as a normal app or as ARK's launcher – is in INSTALL.md. The download is on the Releases page.

If something ever goes wrong, hold SELECT while the PSP boots – ARK then skips its settings and you land in the normal XMB. psp5 also looks after itself. If a start doesn't finish (the PSP froze or was switched off while psp5 was starting), the next start is a safe start without the startup screen, music and UMD. If that doesn't finish either, psp5 sends the PSP to the XMB.

If the HOME menu doesn't respond inside a game, see Help! in INSTALL.md. L + R + START + ↓ always quits a game. That one is built into ARK.

psp5 uses each game's own icon and background automatically. If you'd like your own covers, there's a small tool for your computer that prepares them – see the covers section in INSTALL.md.

psp5 runs on the PSP-1000, PSP-2000, PSP-3000 and PSP Go with ARK-4 or ARK-5 – there's a download for each ARK, on the PSP Go too (see INSTALL.md), and psp5 adapts the settings to your model and ARK version (for example, the PSP-1000 has no extra memory or USB charging, and ARK-4 has fewer CPU speeds).

I've been using it on my own PSP-2000 with ARK-5, and launching games, artwork and covers all work there. ARK-4, the PSP-1000/3000, the music player and the new startup screen are newer and I haven't been able to try them on every combination, so let me know if something behaves oddly. PSP Go support is the newest and untested on real hardware: started from the internal storage (ef0:), psp5 keeps its files there, and it finds games and music on both the internal storage and a Memory Stick Micro. The PS Vita isn't supported.

psp5 is written in C and built with the pspdev toolchain plus psp-cfw-sdk, which provides ARK's headers and libraries. With pspdev installed it's just:

make

On Windows I build it inside WSL – tools/setup-wsl.sh installs the toolchain and tools/build.sh builds dist/PSP/GAME/PSP5/EBOOT.PBP (tools/build.sh ark4 or make ARK=4 builds the ARK-4 version; both also run on the PSP Go).

• The ARK-5 and ARK-4 teams – psp5 starts games and stores settings the same way their arkMenu does, and uses ARK's libraries through psp-cfw-sdk.
• pspdev for the toolchain, PSPSDK and packages.
• intraFont, libpng, zlib, LZ4 and libcisoread.

GPL-3.0 – see LICENSE.

psp5 is an unofficial fan project by Mille Weber. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Sony Interactive Entertainment. "PSP", "PS5" and "PlayStation" are trademarks of Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc.