That's the traditional phrase that programmers display when they create their first piece of software for an unfamiliar operating system. Owners of Sony's handheld PSP game system were delighted to hear May 5 that a hacker had managed to write a small program that displayed those words on a PSP. They wondered what would be next.
As it turned out, it only took hackers five days to go from "Hello World" to Mario World.
On May 10, sites like PSP Hacker reported that a Japanese hacker known only by the name Mr. Mirakichi had developed a program called RIN that let the PSP play software written for the original black-and-white Nintendo Game Boy system.
Emulators like RIN, programs that let a computer run software intended for a different platform, have long been popular among fans of classic video games who want to play the games of yesteryear without having to deal with aging hardware. While emulators themselves are freely distributable, the files that contain game data are protected by copyright. This has barely slowed their popularity.
