2/20/2006
“Unofficial” SWF player for Sony PSP announced
PSPHacks.net last week announced the results of a competition to create a SWF player for Sony's PSP™ (PlayStation™ Portable) handheld device. The result is just that: a "mostly" Flash Player 7 compatible player running on the PSP.
From the site:
The player supports Flash 7 action script. Not everything mind you but a good portion of it.
As for limitations, I would say that people will have to bare in mind that the PSP only has 32mb of RAM.
3mb of that is taken up by the program itself, so there isn't much room left.
Having complex vector shapes is also a bad idea as the shapes are triangulated and produce massive triangle lists.
The bottom line is, try it and see what works and if someone is creating a new animation for the player they need to keep testing it to see if it still works.
Site creators say they'll release the new player "on or about" Feb. 28., and they'll soon sponsor yet another contest to develop Flash content specifically for the PSP.
I've been looking for a legitimate excuse to get a PSP lately, so the announcement couldn't have come at a better time. I'm not thrilled about the specter of "nonstandard" Flash players in the marketplace, but it's good to see people filling voids where they exist.
Guess it's time to get my game on.
6 Responses to ““Unofficial” SWF player for Sony PSP announced”
So what do you think?
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Jesus 29 megs is a ton. Its about 15 times what I have to work with on a daily basis :).
That was my thought, too. I can’t imagine a 29MB file limitation would be a problem for the average Flash developer. Of course, if the player doesn’t have the most efficient memory handling, I could see even a 2k file creating enough process overhead to fill the remaining space quickly.
“I’m not thrilled about the specter of “nonstandard” Flash players in the marketplace”
– If MM aka Adobe released the official flash player as open source, this wouldn’t be a problem. People would focus on porting the official player, instead of porting an unofficial player.
While I don’t own one myself, I’ve always been led to believe that while the PSP is very flashy, the Nintendo DS has proven itself the mightier in terms of real games. Mobile players seem to prefer the actual games and playbility of them on the DS than what often seems as crippled ports to the PSP.
On the other hand, the PSP has proven itself very capable in terms of multimedia and things other than games, it’s just that I don’t really know of many people excited about paying double for a DVD and then its UMD cousin, just so they can watch it on their PSP.
It’s very pretty, but I don’t think it’s quite gotten the idea of technology convergence just right. Honestly, I believe phones are going to be the true market of what the PSP wants to be. My 2¢
The first public version of the PSP Flash Player has been released. Read all about it (and download it) here: http://www.psphacks.net/
Thanks for the update, Pikoro!