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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.."
Sony has again provided nominal updates in their new firmware, in an attempt to entice users to upgrade and lock down the homebrew community.
So now we wait for Dark_aleX to crack this firmware, and for Booster to update Devhook and make the PSP developers "even madder" as users continue to load all versions of the firmware on their 1.50 PSP's.
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!)
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.