Woe is me

Yesterday my girlfriend was towing me around while looking for a new pair of shoes, and while we were in one store, I plopped down on a sofa and whipped out my almost 1-year old PSP.

I was playing N+, and all of a sudden the unit just... died.

I thought, ok, it's just the battery, but I just charged it, so maybe its that RemoteJoyLite plugin -- it's always crashing --, I'll just do cold boot.

So I tried pulling the power switch up for ten seconds. The power LED turns green for a few seconds, then dies. I try it again. The same thing. I have never seen a bricked PSP before, but I hope that that is all it is - a corrupt firmware.

When I got home I try to plug in the AC adapter, to no avail. I went as far as disassembling my PSP. I got as far as removing the LCD frame, but it was almost morning and my girlfriend has work early, so after a few tries I finally got the PSP back together.

Right now I have my PSP with me, at the office. I was hoping to borrow somebody's PSP and make a Pandora battery.

I already have the magic memstick, so unbricking is my last course of action before having the unit fixed (which will cost me the half price of second-hand PSP phat, at least, that's what replacing the motherboard will cost me)

But in my rush not to get to work late, it seems I left the magic memstick at home, bugger that.

The thing is, I haved dropped my PSP (from about 1 foot), and it did fall a bit hard -- hard enough to somehow get the battery cover lock out, but still leave the whole PSP and battery cover lock mechanism intact.

I really wouldn't want to lose my PSP. It's almost a part of me, and 1 year isn't good enough for me to say goodbye to it yet. If I ever resurrect it I promise never to drop it, ever again.

I feel guilty for shelling out some money to fix it after my girlfriend has repeatedly told me how badly I treat it, I almost feel like I don't deserve to have it fixed.

But leaving it broken just doesn't feel right... and if it could never be fixed, I would at least like to scrap the LCD and build a driver for it, turn it into a digital frame or a mini monitor. Good luck with that though - Alexan doesn't even stock up on PICs, much less FPGAs.

If anyone has a phat compatible motherboard to sell (for cheap), let me know?