A trip down the PSP’s past: Web Portals, the things that let us imagine that our PSP was something else!

Many of us have been proud PSP owners sometime in our life and while the console we owned may have seen better days, the memories still live on. Among my memories of the PSP days, I fondly remember web portals which allowed me to ‘experience‘ a massively watered down version of iOS before getting an iPod Touch!

What are web portals?

Web portals provided extremely watered down experiences but they were quite fun to play around with. (X5 Leopard shown)

In its most basic form, a web portal is a locally stored website that consists of many HTML files and images. However, most of them also make use of SWF files that are rendered through Flash Player 6 which is bundled with the PSP’s system software. Using these web portals is pretty easy as all you have to do is copy them to your PSP and navigate to the portal’s ‘index.html’ with the browser.

While they were pretty popular in the PSP’s heyday, they’re mostly forgotten nowadays and finding downloads links for them may prove a bit difficult sometimes since “dl.qj.net” is no longer online. If your PSP is no longer working, you may also use them through Adrenaline on your PSVita as the PSP browser fully works!

4 web portals you should check out

While they may not sound impressive today, web portals allowed many of us to ‘experience’ things we dreamt about owning! (iPSP shown in picture)

Over the years, many web portals have been shared online and some of the more notable ones are:

• iPSP
  • Back in 2008-2010, getting an iPhone or iPod Touch was a dream for many kids who didn’t have much income but you could always pretend you had an iOS device with your PSP!
• pspwXp
  • Ever wanted to get the Windows XP (or Vista) experience on your PSP? Well, with this portal, you can have a watered down experience that’s quite entertaining to use and look at!
• X5 Leopard
  • Once upon a time, Mac OS X Leopard was all the rage and obviously, some of us wanted to experience it on our PSP so this web portal was made.
• Nintendo DS portal
  • If you had a PSP but also wanted to experience the UI of the competitor, this portal was probably the one you should’ve gone witih.
  • Alternatively, you could emulate the DS with DSonPSP with framerates ranging from 0.01-0.1FPS

Conclusion

While some people may consider these portals as unimportant, I personally think that they should still be preserved since they are likely to trigger nostalgia in many of us and whether we like it or not, they are still part of PSP homebrew history!

To see some web portals in action, check out the video linked below. Wololo is not affiliated with the YouTube channel that uploaded the video and it’s only being provided for informational purposes

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