The Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) is a hand-held gaming console released by Sony Computer Entertainment. The PSP is considered the world's first hand-held video game system which has used an optical disc format. The unit is equipped with gaming-oriented controls like the PlayStation face buttons, two shoulder buttons, a digital 4-directional pad, screen brightness, music settings and "Home" button for accessing the system's main menu.
The unit is currently available in seven colours. The unit's 166 MHz graphics chip has 2MiB embedded memory that provides for hardware polygon & NURBS rendering, environment projection & texture mapping, clipping, texture compression & tessellation and dithering, all in 16 or 24 bit colour. The PSP weighs 280 gm (including the battery) and measures 170 mm x 74 mm x 23 mm. It is equipped with a TFT LCD screen which is capable of displaying 16.77 million colours with a resolution of 482 x 272 pixels.
The system has 32 MiB main RAM and 4MiB of eDRAM out of which 2MiB is dedicated to the Graphics Unit. The system's CPU contains 16 KiB of two-way set associative instruction cache and data cache memories. The unit is capable of rendering 33 million flat-shaded polygons per second with a file rate of 664 pixels per second. The PSP is able to play back movies on a Universal Media Disk (UMD) format and its Image Viewer displays a variety of image formats like JPEG, Bitmap and PNG.
The unit's main menu interface consists of a horizontal sequence of icons which shows a vertical sequence of sub-icons when highlighted. Interestingly enough, any videos downloaded to the PSP can be viewed through a streaming USB connection to any Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 which then makes them viewable on a television. The unit can be connected to a wireless network through Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11b. This allows PSP players to create a local network of multi-player game-play and also allows them to connect to the Internet.
