The PSP is the latest in portable gaming technology, and everyone who owns one gets great value from being able to download and play all kinds of games, movies, and music on their PSP.

However, an even better feature of the PSP is that you can use it not only to play PSP games, but also to load and play all your other console games (for example, Nintendo Game Boy games).

To take advantage of this unique feature, you must first download a piece of software onto your PSP, called an emulator (or sometimes referred to as “homebrew”).

An emulator is simply a piece of software that makes your PSP act like an alternative game console, like the Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis.

Once you have loaded an emulator on your PSP, the emulator will allow you to play other game console games on your PSP. Please note, however, that while downloading and installing an emulator is not illegal, downloading games to use in your emulator may be.

SO HOW DO YOU FIND AN EMULATOR FOR YOUR PSP GAME CONSOLE?

Well, first of all, before you can start searching and downloading an emulator for your PSP, you need to check what firmware version your PSP game console has.

This is because the only PSP firmware versions you can download a game on are versions 1.0 and 1.50, as currently firmware versions 1.51 and higher will not allow you to run an emulator.

You can check the firmware version on your PSP console by simply scrolling to the left on the PSP main screen and selecting the options in the following order: SETTINGS > SYSTEM SETTINGS > SYSTEM INFORMATION > SYSTEM SOFTWARE. The SYSTEM SOFTWARE option should show you the firmware version number of your PSP.

Now that you have checked that you have the correct firmware version, you can now browse for an emulator.

The best option for PSP game console owners is to start by searching for large official PSP download websites. They offer you the opportunity to download emulators for your PSP (as well as download a wide range of legal games, music and TV shows).

You can also try doing a search for the required PSP emulator (for example, by typing Nintendo PSP Emulator into a search engine). Be careful though, that software you download from small unofficial websites can do more harm than good to your PSP game console.