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Custom Firmware For the PSP-3000 Released
Busshy writes "Today, owners of PSP-3000 consoles, and those on PSP-2000s with boards that were previously incompatible, have now joined all those who have been enjoying PSP homebrew for years with the release of a new custom firmware that brings emulation and much more to those systems. You will need the recent Chickhen homebrew enabler installed for it to work."
Custom Firmware for the PSP-3000. What is it all about... is it good, or is it whack?
Emulation has been possible on the PSP-3000 for a while now thanks to the ChickHEN TIFF exploit. In fact, the installer for this custom firmware takes advantage of that exploit. The biggest draw for most to running custom firmware is the ability to create and run UMD backups.
Emulation is great, and I would crack my PSP just for that, if I had one.
But it is just a bit disingenuous of the summary to not mention game piracy. It is one of the main reasons people install the new firmware; I suspect it's by far the primary driving force. It's also the main reason Sony is constantly plugging the holes and making revisions. It's not to combat emulation and homebrew.
I have no problem with modifying things you own; but the actual reasons that most people are interested in it shouldn't be just ignored. That's not intellectually honest.
What really sucks with regards to this whole area of tinkering is the DMCA and other laws that make it illegal to tinker with your own property. Companies can do all the want to try to hinder it if they want to waste time and money on that, it certainly provides a nice challenge for the people that like trying to crack these things. But when the law just makes it illegal, that's bullshit. It ends up making the most curious and intelligent of us, into criminals.
Yes, you can use this to pirate. Whoopdodoo. There are lots of other benefits you're overlooking.
- Running games off the memstick is much faster than waiting for the UMD to load
- You can fit several games on the memstick (some may be pirated, if you're a dishonest prick who wants the platform to fail). That means you don't need to lug a ton of fragile disks around when you travel.
- Not using the UMD means extended battery life.
This is really spiffy, don't get me wrong. But what I'd really like is an update to 5.50 firmware so the copy of Final Fantasy VII I just BOUGHT will play on my hacked PSP. I think all the PS1 re-releases from E3 require updated firmware, and that blows.
Does narcissism count as a hobby? --Shawn Latimer
Take that figure. Double it. Subtract 4. Then multiply by a million and you'll be close to the number of PSPs sold. There have been about 48 million PSPs sold to date. In the history of hand held consoles, the PSP has been the most successful competitor to Nintendo's offerings.
I'm sure the remaining 50,000,000 PSP owners are thrilled!
Fixed that for you.
You can go save your self some time and buy a Pandora with hardware specs 2-3 times better and totally open for hacking.
Custom Firmware is a bit of a misnomer. For the PSP-3000 (and last sub-model of the 2000, T88v3) it's not possible to replace the built-in firmware with a truly custom firmware, as Sony does signature checking that would keep the PSP from loading unsigned firmware. This is different from the early PSPs, where it was possible to fake out the device and make it accept any firmware.
Anyhow, this isn't a custom firmware in the traditional sense, rather it's more of a injection attack of the PSP's operating system. Normally unsigned code is blocked by the OS, but there's a vulnerability in the TIFF decoder that allows for executing such code. Using the ChickHEN tool (a compromised TIFF file and a payload) the OS's signature checks can be compromised by injecting replacement files in to the running OS, which the PSP happily complies with. With the check disabled, the PSP will run unsigned code for homebrew, but it lacks the drivers necessary to run backup/pirated games. This is an important distinction, because the ChickHEN tool has been around for a few weeks now and is not what TFA is talking about.
This latest hack (5.03 GEN-A) finally takes it one step further and uses the ability to run unsigned code to inject the additional drivers needed to make the PSP treat ISOs on a Memory Stick as a UMD game. This hack isn't necessary to run homebrew, it's solely for running commercial games. Notably it's still entirely a runtime attack, and if the PSP cold boots it will return to normal operation.
This is to Sony's advantage (what little good news there is, at least), because the hardware has not been compromised in any way. As PSPs can not be flashed with earlier firmware versions, all PSPs running firmware versions later than 5.03 can not be attacked as the TIFF vulnerability was fixed. This limits the number of vulnerable units to old units that haven't been upgraded, as new units will come with the fixed firmware. Of course this doesn't preclude another software vulnerability being found in the OS or a hardware attack, but usable software vulnerabilities are very rare, and a hardware attack would be the equivalent of the Holy Grail at this point.
Anyhow, since it's not a real custom firmware, it's not necessarily a viable long-term hack. Users will never be able to upgrade their firmware, so any software that requires a later firmware version (and can't be trivially bypassed by lying to it) would be unusable in hacked PSPs. Sony no doubt will be working to isolate hacked PSPs in this manner.
Or you could simply buy a PSP 1000 (phat) for half the price and get a proper CFW on it, not just an eggsploit which disappears whenever you perform a hard-reset.
I think buying a new PSP is a waste of money, especially when Sony was so nice as to make everything 100% backwards compatible. The only advantages of the PSP 3000 towards the 1000 is it weighs less, comes in all kinds of ugly colors, and has a terribly cheap microphone embeded in it.
Why don't they allow homebrew then? They let people install Linux on their PS3.
Because Linux for PLAYSTATION 3 has no access to the NVIDIA RSX GPU apart from a dumb frame buffer, it is less powerful than a PC for 3D games. The big draws of a PS3 over a PC are 1. you get to use most of the Cell CPU's DSP cores (except for one that the hypervisor reserves), and 2. the PS3 can display on an older, pre-HD television without needing a $40 box to convert VGA to S-Video. So it's better than a PC for high-performance computing, but the PC is better for homebrew gaming.
I'm guessing that Sony put Linux on the PS3 because Sony wanted to train developers to write the firmware for other products using a Cell CPU. A PSP, on the other hand, has a fairly traditional architecture. In addition, the PS3 had pressure from another platform: if you can homebrew on a PC running Windows (using tools such as MinGW or Python), you're more likely to buy games for the PC. I haven't seen a lot of PDAs with 3D graphics or traditional gaming controls yet.
As a PSP and DS lover, with around 30+ games for each, I hate custom firmware, and wish Sony and Nintendo the best in locking down the systems.
Then on what handheld platform would you prefer to run homemade games instead of Sony's, Nintendo's, and Apple's (which is locked down in a similar manner)?
and without the PSP's great library of commercial games.
A lot of PSP games are either sequels to games on the original PlayStation (PS1) or even emulated versions of games for the PS1 or older systems, especially on PSN. The prototypes of the Pandora gaming PDA can emulate the PS1: rip your discs and put the ISO on the SD card.
If only they had opened up the PSP system more to developers.
I would have killed to have a note taker, calendar, alarm, simple drawing app, etc.
CUSTOMIZATION.
Instead of this, the only ways you can get it are either by homebrew or through the web browser. (or some crappy UMD with applications on it)
Now they, developers, AND the gamers, are having to suffer due to this stupid restrictive development.
I would have killed to have a note taker, calendar, alarm, simple drawing app, etc.
Don't kill. If you want a PDA, buy a PDA: either a Pocket PC running Windows Mobile or the forthcoming Pandora. Perhaps you should complain that Sony killed the CLIE too soon.
It's a bit disingenuous to say that people only/mostly install CFW to play pirated games. The PSP didn't start out having very good games, and people still say its library is pretty slim. Most people I know who own a PSP only use it to play homebrew, and not PSP games at all. I don't think the PSP would have risen to such popularity if it wasn't for the homebrew scene.
As an actual games machine, it's cumbersome. The load times are long, UMDs suck up your battery, the games are too involving, and the amount/type of buttons on the PSP is not suited for the type of experiences that officially licensed developers are trying to cram in there. Homebrew games are perfect, and with emulators you have save states.
People don't like putting their PSPs to sleep because the battery still gets drained rather quickly, and you can't switch out games and resume quite as quickly as you can switch ROMs and load up a save state. If you play in short bursts you tend to forget where you are in a lengthier PSP game. So homebrew is much more attractive. For official games, dumping your UMDs on a memory stick is also a lot handier than carrying around a bunch of discs; They load faster, and use less battery.
While piracy is a problem on the PSP, it is not its biggest problem. The games just don't deliver what consumers want.
Twinstiq, game news
when modding is outlawed only outlaws will mod
doesn't mean they will have the least idea of how to program a decent game.
much less how to recruit - and hang on to - outside talent.
scripting. direction. level design. art design.
character design and animation. props. backgrounds. textures. music. audio and visual effects. vocal performance....
development and distribution through legitimate channels for the XBox, the PC, the iPhone and other platforms opens doors to advancement in the real world.
and that is something you can sell to the 3D modeler you want on your team.
Most graphics cards already have an s-video output.
Most desktop PCs that I've seen lately don't have a graphics card. Instead, they have an Intel GMA on the motherboard with only a VGA output.
Actually it was an experiment in testing the mods. The last time a PSP story came up, I made an almost identical post and got +5, funny. This time -1, troll.
Fascinating.
So if I download an iso of a PSone game (that I own the actual disc for) to play on my custom firmware enabled PSP am I committing copyright infringement?
I do this all the time and I don't consider it infringement of anything other than depriving Sony from charging me twice for the same thing
You know another major cause of a large shift away from PC gaming? The consoles are pretty bad ass. In fact, they're on par or better than most PCs and it's a consistent platform for game development.