WiFi Gaming on a PSP, by my 12 Years Old Son Tom

While building FON I realized by chance that my 12 year old son Tom was a big user of WiFi to play games on his PSP. I asked him to explain to me how he uses the PSP for WiFi and this is what he wrote.

Psp’s use WiFi for many reasons, but before I tell you about those let me tell you how you get a conection in the first place.

Psp’s scan for networks and give you all the possibilities, their signal strength and if they are secured or not. One thing the Sony guys were keen on was security as you get all these codes and passwords to use the browser on your own psp. For online gaming you need to get an account at whatever online gaming company your game uses (GameSpy, Game Shadow etc.) this is a bother but whats even worse is each time you make an account you have to put in this code called ‘Network Access Code’ which is a 14 digit code which you take for granted when you see it in the box and many times throw away. This is precisely what happened to me but in the end I found it.
Once you make an account at whatever program you choose in ,your psp, between something called AD HOC and something called INFRASTRUCTURE. Theese might sound weird and complicated but basicly AD HOC means two or more players playing right next to each other and INFRASTRUCTURE means any player in the world against any player in the world using wifi.
Now I want to tell you more about one specific game and how online gaming works on it. Dark Mirror the latest game I bought works like this. When you go on multiplayer on your psp you have two options AD HOC and INFRASTRUCTURE. If you pick AD HOC you’re psp searches for players in range and if someone in range is doing the same thing as you(On the same channel as you searching for other players), you are told ,on your screen, and you can play.This system does not use wifi.It uses Infrared or bluetooth but I’m not sure and it doesn’t really matter.If you choose INFRASTRUCTURE you come to a screen where you have to type the username and password you got from the Network Access Code. After this the standard psp menu for choosing or creating a network comes up where you either choose a created network or make a new one. To make a new one you scan the area select an SSID give it your own name and choose to secure it or not. In the psp they call this network update. After that you come to whats called ‘lobby’ where players either ‘host’ or join a game. A great thing you can do in the lobby which I found impresive is keeping a mail Inbox with contacts of people who are online. Then you come to a screen where all the usernames that are going to play appear and here you wait until the right numbers of players appear. While you wait you can either chat with other people by typing or even talk to them by a sort of radio system where only one person at a time can talk. Both the written chat and the talk are meant for the use of game tactics but many people use it to talk to their friends. After this you start the game in which you can only use the speech tool, mainly because you don’t have a keyboard and it would take ages to type something while being vulnerable to the enemy. All that I’ve just said is not true for all games but they all follow more or less the same guidelines. Also not all games have INFRASTRUCTURE mode and only AD HOC or the other way round but they nearly allways have some method of multiplayer mode. When you buy a new game the back cover shows either a sticker that says wireless compatible or something which says Game sharing, wireless compatible means it has INFRASTRUCTURE mode and game sharing means AD HOC.
Another wifi use on psp’s is something I’m sure you haven’t heard of P-TV (portable television). This programs use I have no clue of mainly because once you get to access it all the writing is in Japanese, but anyway let me just tell you how it works. Once you run it you will need to get a network (like I told you before). Then you get to this website with everything in Japanese but from what I understood from google translate is that you search for a genre or topic and find a broadcasting station like a news channel or anything like that and download it and after that every time you use it again you can zap through the channels like a TV which works on wifi. Sadly all the channels I’ve found are in Japanese but theese guys are probably big in Japan and so this is probably another great thing you can have with a global wireless network in Japan.
One other way of having live TV on your psp is something called ‘Location Free Player’. For what I understood from the discription by Sony location free player is a multimedia station which connects to your TV and DVD player allowing it to receive live television. It can also use wifi to download video content. All these video and TV broadcasts can get to your psp or PC if it is in range. But you can also get the same feed anywhere in the world through our precius wifi. This works by having the station post it’s contents on a unique website and accesing it with a username and password.