One of the sad realities of collecting consoles is that they can often lose some of their most interesting or valuable features over time. This includes features like being able to access official storefronts and servers, or simply being able to connect effortlessly to the internet.
Fortunately for players, though, there is a fairly expansive community online of modders and developers for various retro machines — many of whom continue to pump out unofficial fixes and solutions to restore some of those missing features and continue where the original developers left off.
This, for instance, is the case, in regards to the creators of the PlayStation Portable custom firmware ARK, who have recently announced that they have introduced the ability to connect to WPA2 networks with the latest Stable release of ARK4 (thanks Wololo for the spot). This comes courtesy of a new wpa2psp plugin from the PSP Homebrew Discord member and developer Moment, which the team has now integrated into the most recent version of the custom firmware.
For years, fans of the PSP have gone online to ask for advice from other players on how to connect to the internet using their home Wi-Fi, only to be greeted with the sad reality that they couldn't join their home network due to the Sony handheld never officially supporting WPA2-encrypted networks. This new plugin, therefore, aims to rectify that, allowing players to go online using networks that take advantage of this "de facto" encryption standard.
Right now, there are some limitations, as documented by an individual named Nebula_NL on Reddit. The plugin, for example, is only limited to 2.4 GHz, which could potentially cause issues if your router uses a single SSID for both 2.4GHz and 5GHz. It also only applies to just WPA2 AES-encrypted networks and will disable WEP and WPA while in use (you must disable WPA2 if you want to switch everything back).
Routers that use a mixed mode for WPA2/WPA3 can also reportedly experience issues with obtaining an IP address.
If you fancy giving this a try, you can download the latest version of ARK4 here. A separate installation solution is also available for people who prefer not to update ARK4 or who are using another custom firmware.