I bought mine in 2nd grade with the money I saved up from some gifts I got. The only 2 games I had were NFS undercover and GTA liberty city stories. I could play them for hours over and over again.

Unfortunately mine got stolen

I resurrected my girlfriends PSP recently and really fun. I need to get liberty city stories and nfs again

I’m thinking of buying another one for my nephew for him to experience the same

I also heard that USB 1.1 is slow, but it seems faster than the DVD drive, and that’s my only comparison point. I was going to get the memory card to SD card adapter since I’ve read is faster, but I don’t care honestly.

I just run most of the games from a USB stick. I would go with an HDD, I have dozens of ~250 GB laying around, but I don’t have the network/HDD expansion, YET

That’s quite bad, on mine the second controller port doesn’t work. Fortunately the drive works fine.

Maybe you could try FreeMcBoot