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PSP Firmware Update 2.8 Available
tekisui writes "PSP firmware update 2.8 is out, adding several minor features and one major one, the ability to play music and video out of user-named folders on memory sticks. Finally, I can label my movies and music with useful names, instead of Sony's cryptic naming conventions.."
If you ripped games for the sole purpose of making them onto ISOs so you can play them off memory stick, the PSP firmware is similar. Sure it's got a more advanced kernel that can do more stuff (multithreading!), but most games come with their own versions of the system libraries (and the 2.x ones are updated to look for 2.x kernels even if they don't use any features of it).
UMDs suck, so I rip my PSP games to ISOs and play off of memory stick - you won't believe how fast games can run that way (or how godawful slow UMD is). Of course, for new games, that involves decrypting the game files, replacing the system libraries with 1.x ones, and a few other tricks. A library of 1.x games will provide the necessary 1.x system libraries, and there are decryption programs to decrypt executables using keys stored in firmware.
The firmware provides some system libraries as well, but I believe those are only for the built-in apps, rather than games. (Makes sense, since no one wants to have to deal with library hell when they buy a console game!)
They did so in an earlier update (2.5 I believe). It wasn't listed in the changelog though.
The DS firmware has multiple versions, however updating is transparent to the user, and occurs when they fire up a game with the firmware update on it.
Uhh... sorry, but this is *totally* wrong. The DS firmware is different on later hardware revisions, however it is impossible to transparently update the firmware on an existing DS, because the region of the EEPROM containing the firmware checksum can't be written to without shorting the SL1 pad on the board.
Actually, I am old enough to "remember the Nintendo before Sony kicked them in the nuts with the PS", and I'm going to disagree with you. The reason lies in the times before the PSX existed.
Remember back in the 16-bit days, when there were a whopping 4 revisions of the SNES, mainly to update board designs for newer parts from different suppliers? And Sega had the Genesis with several dozen revisions, some of which completely broke compatibility with early games? Yeah, this all sounds familiar. And Sega was chasing a similar phantom at the time - cartridge pirates in Hong Kong.
For the SNES, Rev. A was at the Japanese launch in June 1991. The Rev. B SNES was a bugfix revision ready for the US launch in November 1991. The Rev. C was released in mid-life in about 1994, presumably due to chip/supplier changes, though it did break the Game Genie for some games. Rev. D was released with the case redesign at the end of the product life cycle (circa 1996) and was all about cheap parts redesigned into the board.
For the Genesis, well, there were several revisions of each major release, with each major release typically accompanied by a case redesign. There were at least 4 case designs, and there were games which were widely known not to work on newer-release consoles. (Populous was one of the games that I can remember with this problem.) This is at least partly to blame for the relatively weak emulation support for the Genesis even now. It just wasn't a stable hardware platform. That's to say nothing of the fact that the hardware was kinda sketchy anyway.
Nintendo is all about having a stable platform because they know that if they don't, people won't buy their crap when they break compatibility. They always have been. And they're wise to do the same now, despite Sony's current "dominance" of the market (I put that in quotation marks because Sony hasn't dominated anything in my living room for a long time). Sony will eventually shoot themselves in the foot much as Sega did, and Nintendo will still be there, making good games and good profits. Speaking of that, does anyone remember when Sega released the Saturn for "way more than anyone is going to pay for a game console," as the industry pundits said in 1995? I do. I remember Sony spanking the Saturn's overpriced bugginess into oblivion. I feel a similar beatdown approaching the PS3.