Haha, yeah, lots of nostalgia for that little guy. I have completely forgotten the technical details of the toolchain, I just remember it was GCC-based and ran in Cygwin. The games I wrote didn't use any of the hardware rendering of the system. It was all writing pixels directly into the framebuffer because that's what the hello-world sample I had access to did. For how simple the games were relative to the hardware, I frequently ran into performance problems because of this, drawing every single pixel one by one.

I did submit them to a couple of those PSP homebrew blogs and got some feedback from comments sections & such. I even submitted Dyox to a contest and won a flash cart for the GBA, though I never ended up doing much homebrew there. A couple years ago someone cataloging old PSP homebrew games actually uploaded videos of one of the games to YouTube which blew me away (sadly recorded at half-framerate, so the transparency effects don't work because they rendered every-other frame).

I never looked into how the jailbreaks worked. My recollection is I only had to drop a file onto the storage and it would magically hack it for me. I actually never bought or even pirated a single game for the system, I only ever used it for homebrew and emulators and web browsing, hah.

If you're really curious, you can see the blog posts I wrote about the games 20+ years ago:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070220171034/http://brightnigh...

https://web.archive.org/web/20101012080343/http://brightnigh...