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smolZINE - Issue 42

2025-01-26

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Hidden (and not so hidden) Gems
• Emanations
• Recreation
• Community Contributions & Discussion

Introduction

Hello geminispace, hope you have been well. Finally getting another issue out, yay!

Hidden (and not so hidden) Gems

Captain's Quarters

It's almost as if Captain was genetically modified to appeal to this smolZINE editor. Cycling? Yes please. PalmOS? Yes! Writing new PalmOS games in 2024/25 and reading gemini on Palm?! *Swoon* Oh and there's also Vaselining Your Balls.

Cornquest

A nice little choose your own adventure game by dozens.

Gemini Plugin for KOReader

Venerable geminaut thegonz is back with yet another excellent contribution to the gemini ecosystem. The KOReader gemini browser plugin for KOReader has become one of my favorite ways to browse gemini. It works very well and accessing gemini on an eink display is so nice.

New Offpunk Release

Ploum and contributor Bert Livens (plus others) have pushed an update to my favorite gemini client Offpunk. There are a number of fixes and most importantly a new feature in this release. Client-side certificates are now supported in Offpunk!

Emanations

PSP, The One True Handheld

by kelbot

The Sony PSP is still an amazing gaming and media device. Dare I say the best for those with a certain set of priorities. Still. Twenty years after its initial release. Yes, I know any number of more modern devices are technically better in all of the areas PSP treads. I would argue though that the PSP as a whole package wins for what I value in a portable gaming device. The PSP was a perfect storm of timing, legendary Sony design and an incredible hacker community. The result is a superbly designed and beautiful device that is more capable and versatile than you'd expect a portable from 20 years ago to be.

I have been gaming on handhelds since the original Game Boy and Atary Lynx. A slew of handhelds have come and gone from my gaming life and the PSP was the pinnacle. Not only did it stick with me the longest but I still find it to be my favorite gaming handheld to this day. There is a sweet spot where the PSP sits that is just enough modern computing convenience before things veered off course into anti-features. This is just a coincidence of timing and sheer hacker brute-force extending the solid base from which Sony gave us to play with.

In it's stock Sony sanctioned state it was pretty dang good. The design, typical of Sony, was beautiful, functional and robust. The game library by the end of it's life was huge and has tons of excellent games and many lesser-known gems to discover. Sony also gave us an unexpectedly capable general purpose portable computer with the PSP. It had Wifi, a surprisingly capable web browser, and could play music and movies/tv shows. In a time before most people had cell phones and before cell phones with all those features really existed this was incredible. But what took the PSP from great to legendary was the community of hackers that sprung up around it. Nearly every shortcoming you could knock the PSP for was remedied by homebrew developers.

As cool as the UMD format is carrying around loads of discs was a hassle. The PSP included a memory stick slot intended for save files and media storage. Once the PSP was hacked it became possible to backup your UMDs to the memory stick and run them directly from flash memory. Not only did this allow you to stop lugging around stacks of UMDs it also came with an improvement to battery life. Homebrew developers also have developed a slew of amazing plugins that add new features to Sony's OS software and change the behavior of various functions for better quality of life.

Some of my favorite plugins are Hold+, PSPStates Menu Pict Mod and Categories Lite. Hold+ takes Sony's already really nice included music player and turns it into an incredibly good portable music player. Once you flick your PSP's power switch to Hold this plugin disables the screen, underclocks the CPU massively while still maintaining flawless audio playback, increases music library scrolling speed and enables intuitive key combos for controlling playback via the buttons while the screen is off. This not only improves the experience it also extends battery life while listening to music from the standard 5 hours to 10 or more while using Hold+. You know how emulators have this great ability to save the state of a game at any time? PSPStates lets you do that for PSP games. Pretty incredible to have that for games on the original hardware. Categories Lite simply lets you categorise your games and apps to help keep things organized in the interface. Quite handy now that you can keep dozens or hundreds of games on your memory stick.

Then there are the plethora of homebrew games and applications. All manner of different games that hobbyists have created that you can discover and play. Ports of games like Celeste and Cave Story exist. There is a fan recreation of Portal that plays really well. Another cool one is the FuSa Gamepad app. When you launch this app you can then connect your PSP to any computer and it will act as a generic USB gamepad. The last key piece is emulators. The PSP CPU architecture was very similar to the original Playstation's and Sony was able to emulate the PS1 on the PSP. They only made certain games available however so the hacker community modified it run any PS1 you wanted. On top of that there is also a port of an emulator for virtually every game system released prior to the PS1.

Even today I still use my PSP as my primary handheld. I play many great games (PSP and dozens of other systems as well), listen to music, watch movies and all on a device that actually fits in my pocket, has a removable battery and works great completely offline.

Recreation

Stinky Pinky

by kelbot

To play Stinky Pinky you will need to read the two descriptions below. They each describe a word and the two words rhyme. Example: 1. Smelly, 2. Finger; Answer: Stinky Pinky. Get it? You can email your answer to the address found at the bottom of each smolZINE to confirm if you are correct. The first to answer wins...uhhh I haven't figured that out yet so my congrats will have to do for now.

1. Don't call it dirt

2. Very hard work

Community Contributions & Discussion

Please consider taking part in making this zine better and more diverse by contributing your thoughts and finds. If you are interested in contributing a short article or capsule picks email me at: smolzine (at) cyberbot.space.

If you have any feedback or just want to discuss anything related to gemini or smolZINE hit me up at the above email or ping me on the fediverse at kelbot@retro.social and/or use the #smolZINE tag.

Thanks

Thank you to all our fellow geminauts for continuing to make this place fun and interesting.