Anyone who has even spent some time playing on an emulator knows what a savestate is. They're useful and can be invaluable when you're in a very difficult area of a game, but commercial games and consoles don't usually support the savestate feature.

All that may change if this new experimental plugin from Dark AleX proves feasible. The plugin itself is called PspStates and, as you may have guessed from the title, it lets you create savestates while playing games on your PSP Slim. Not in an emulator, but on your handheld itself. And yes, it's for Slims only.

Now in order to run this plugin, you'll need your PSP to be running on at least 4.01 M33. You also need a good memory stick. This is important as fake memory sticks may cause slowdowns when saving or loading savestates. Also, here's a very important reminder from the author himself:

DO NOT USE this plugins with umd's inserted, and do not use it of course with UMD's in normal mode, even isofs mode is not recommended. Use only in march33 (recommended), np9660 or in homebrew. You can have the plugin loaded in umd's, as soon as YOU DON'T USE IT.

Okay, so we know that you may be excited, but before you click on the download, remember that this plugin is still experimental and may cause data loss or other damage to your PSP. It is highly recommended that you make backups of your nand before trying it out. Heck, make a backup of your memory stick's entire contents too just to be on the safe side. Also make sure that you can unbrick your PSP if you ever run into any problems.

Do not forget to read the readme file bundled with the plugin. We can't stress this enough.