Homebrew made the PSP a killer emulation machine way ahead of its time. You could emulate the original PlayStation, which was how I got around to playing the original Final Fantasy 7 (although I think this also had an official release, my memory is fuzzy). And it could emulate the SNES, which was how I got around to playing Chrono Trigger.

Funnily enough, I remember some rumors going around about some people trying to develop an N64 emulator which never got released or went anywhere, AFAIK. I have a vague memory of a guy going by the ID PSDonkey or something like that.

I played a bit of Super Mario 64 using an early version of Daedalus, so it was more than a rumour :>

Granted, it ran at about 80-90% realtime speed, and audio was a no-go, but maybe that improved in later releases.

As someone who modded my PSP a few years ago I can confirm that Mario 64 now runs fine with working sound, and you can even force it into widescreen

FF7 did get an official PSN release playable on PSP. You could play FF1-9 on PSP by the end of it's life once the port of the DS version of FFIII arrived. There was also a PSN release of the PS1 version of Chrono Trigger, which is actually how I played through it (although perhaps on Vita).

PS1 emulation on the PSP is actually mostly a native Sony feature! Sony has always been very interested in backwards compatibility; initially to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of a new console not having many titles available at launch, but later largely focusing on additional revenue by selling people digital downloads for games they might well already own (because they removed native media compatibility...)

For the PSP, media compatibility was obviously never a possibility, but as I understand it, the native PS1 emulator on the PSP essentially works with completely unmodified PS1 ISOs in some sort of container file format, which homebrew developers have then quickly reverse engineered.

The emulator itself is technically quite impressive, and apparently largely runs unmodified PS1 MIPS R3000 code on the PSP's MIPS R4000, although the GPU is emulated [1].

[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/investigating-the-psps-psone-emula...

Grand Theft Auto 3 (Liberty City Stories) running on the handheld... mind blown.