Swapless PSP Exploit Released

YDKCooKiE writes "According to psphacker.com, an updated exploit for PSP 1.5 has been released, allowing PSP 1.5 users to play homebrew software without requiring the swap trick."

Comments

Just tried it

[pjameson]

I just tried this yesterday, and finally I get to see what I was missing by having the 1.5 firmware. They really did a great job on this release, but it's going to suck when you have to update to play new commercial games

Because the whole page is basically an ad...

[Tuxedo Jack]

Here's the text and the link it links to.

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Just when your fingers are getting sore and your friends keep asking 'Why do you have to switch memory sticks?' Killer-X and the PSP-Dev team have answered our prayers with KXploit, a way to run homebrew on 1.5's... Minus the memory stick swap!

The predecessor of Swaploit, users will now enjoy no more jammed fingers or broken nails with the introduction of "Direct Loader", and 1.5 users can now pretend they own a 1.0.

One of our users, Gavin King (Thanks), posted a comment on how to do this in its simplest form:

"If any of this confused you.... just do the same thing you did with swaploit, but put both folders on the same memory.

Let's use your NES folder as an example.

Your MS1 folder name "NES%" and your MS2 folder leave it the same, naming it "NES".

And that's all you need to do... a simple rename and move."

(I myself tested and verified this to work.)

You can get it in our PSP Download section here.

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The file they're referring to is here:

http://files.psphacker.com/cgi-bin/cfiles.cgi?0,0, 0,0,38,469

Re:Exploit?

[linguae]

From dictionary.com:

1. To employ to the greatest possible advantage: exploit one's talents.
2. To make use of selfishly or unethically: a country that exploited peasant labor. See Synonyms at manipulate.
3. To advertise; promote.

Well, installing this exploit does employ the PSP to the greatest possible advantage, IMO, so that definition of the word works fine. Of course, exploit has ta negative definition, but I see nothing negative about using your PSP to play homebrew games, Linux, and other "unsupported" stuff, so I guess the definition of exploit is relative to the speaker/listener.

Technical Explanation

[Bri3D]

This is really old news...anyway...here's the technical explanation of how this works.
The original Japanese PSPs would run unencrypted code straight off of memory sticks. Then Sony released firmware 1.50. Firmware 1.50 required ALL code it ran to be encrypted. But there was a flaw. Some people from a group called psp-dev discovered that the PSP firmware only checked for unencrypted code ONCE, when it read the archive with the name of the application, the icon, etc. They determined that by making an archive with NO code in it, the psp would give it the OK because there was NO code in it whatsoever. Then the memory sticks would be swapped, and the PSP code loader would run the code off the second stick. But that wasn't good enough for PSP-DEV. Using a flaw in the FAT driver on PSP they were able to make this work with ONE memory stick. Why? When two folders are placed on the memory stick, one with a percent sign after it containing the archive and one without a percent sign containing the code, the PSP would allow you to select the archive, then the PSP bootstrapper would read the directory without the %, because the PSP bootstrap and FAT driver do not understand % signs.