The Sony Playstation Portable handheld game console is iconic partially because of it's prolific homebrew scene. It was the first game console that I personally owned as a kid, and perhaps in some way it inspired me to become a software engineer. At the very least, it inspired me to hack, and hack it I did. Shortly after I got the PSP, I brought it to a random electronics consultant in my hometown to perform the Pandora's Battery hack which required a soldering iron I did not have at the time. I know many others who had similar experiences.
Lately I've been working on a project called rust-psp. It's exactly what you think it is, a rust-lang toolchain for making PSP Homebrew. We have achieved parity with the unofficial C SDK for user-mode applications. What does an enterprising rust hacker do when he has met C? Go further. It all starts with Puzzle Bobble. While reading the C SDK to translate it to Rust, I came across an interesting comment in the source code:
/* Note: Some of the structures, types, and definitions in this file were
extrapolated from symbolic debugging information found in the Japanese
version of Puzzle Bobble. */
Debug information in Puzzle Bobble you say? Fascinating. After seeing this comment a few times in various files, I couldn't help but crack it open in radare2/Cutter. I had previously attempted reverse engineering C64 Pacman, so I knew my way around the tool, and I was waiting on a PR to be merged before I could implement rust-std for PSP. So I cracked it open and found entire libraries that were not yet in the C SDK. Eventually radare2/Cutter became limiting and I switched to Ghidra.
I reverse engineered sceGuDebugPrint from Puzzle Bobble, and there are many things in Puzzle Bobble I still have to work on, but I couldn't help but wonder, "How many other games like this are there?" The answer I've found so far is 12. If you find more, please let me know.
I made this website to share findings with the community and have a central place for this information on the web. You are welcome to contribute on github.