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."

Comments

Uses

[Toonol]

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.

Re:Uses

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure there's an analogy about knives or some such to be made here. Anybody and everybody who owns a PSP should put a custom firmware on it - not because of piracy, but because UMDs are bulky and easily damaged, and the moving parts in your PSP aren't going to last forever. This is why I applaud Sony for the direction they're taking with the PSP Go, though I'm not such a fan of the device itself at this point.

Re:Uses

[Daemonax]

Sorry, are you really that incapable of clear thinking? This is not about copyright infringement, nor would your hypothetical situation be. If I purchased cisco hardware, I think I should absolutely have the right to run alternative firmware on it. I run OpenWRT on my Linksys WRT54GL, which I'm fairly certain is legal, but even if it weren't legal it would be the law that is the problem, not the people who were illegally running OpenWRT on hardware that they owned.

Now this unofficial PSP firmware may largely be used by people intent on violating copyright law. Whether they're right or wrong to do this though, it is a separate issue from being allowed to run unofficial firmware on your own property.

You might argue that the firmware they're running is a modified official version, which is under a restrictive copyright license. That probably is the case in this specific instance. But you're not thinking clearly if you think that people who run unofficial firmware on their own hardware, are also committing copyright violations.

Re:Uses

[Anonymous Coward]

What if your alternative firmware was intended to allow your router to flout FCC regulations?

Re:Uses

[Anonymous Coward]

Then the FCC should come after you...what does that have to do with copyright law?

Re:Uses

[lordofthechia]

I own a PSP (got it as a gift) and enjoy the ability to play games I own in physical form (Genesis, SNES, NES cartridges) in an easy and portable format. It's like having a Sega Nomad with awesome battery life and the ability to play games from many other consoles.

If people are going to generalize and say that hacked PSPs are only used for piracy then you might as well lump in ipods and any other mp3 player that allows you to play non-drm'd media since after all, *nobody* uses those to play their backed up CDs... Those same people may as well support the position that it's wrong to use snippets of music from your own collection as ringtones, and that you must pay to use your music on each device you own.

Of course, by trying to re-patch PSPs with firmware downloads from new games, Sony has ensured that I won't buy any games for it. Oh and about the DS flashcard I've considered getting one for my wife, it would allow her to keep several games in her DS while the originals are safe at home.

I've always thought that these companies should get their heads out of their asses, help develop emulators and open their own ROM app store. Sell old game ROMS for .99 ea or bundles that are $4.95 which include 5-10 games. This would allow them to sell games for *EVERY SYSTEM* that has an emulator! If it works for music, it should work with classic games.

This would include PSPs, Wii's, Game Parks, Mac, Windows, Linux, XBOXs, etc, etc! They could even include ROMS for games as promotional items included with whatever their newest game is!

Re:Uses

[Anonymous Coward]

presence of much PSP/DS piracy appears to be scaring developers away, resulting in less handheld games, particularly for the PSP. :(

The DS has a ton of games in the pipe. Most of them are shovelware, but that kind of refutes your point.

As for the PSP, the reason no one releases games for it is:

1. The PSP market is ridiculously small. There's a reason the DS section is two whole rows and the PSP section is stuck in with the half-row PS3 section in most stores. And when you realize half of THAT is UMD movies...

2. Sony is killing the UMD in future PSP models. Why develop for something that will be gone?

What really sucks...

[Daemonax]

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.

Re:What really sucks...

[weirdo557]

when modding is outlawed only outlaws will mod

Difference between PSP and PS3

[tepples]

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.

Re:Emulation and much more

[Chaos Incarnate]

Because of course no legitimate customer would ever want to have the ability to carry all of their games on one memory card, instead of a stack of discs

Re:Piracy, Shmiracy

[Anonymous Coward]

distributing copies to others?

Who said anything about that? Just throttle your upload speeds and there you go. As though the people downloading a torrent aren't going to get their copy of Final Fantasy 7 anyway.

Re:Graphics card? There is no card.

[Sj0]

That brings another thing to mind: The PS3 and Xbox 360 are strongly designed with HD in mind. Some games are unplayable on a standard television because the text is so high resolution.

If you own a decent HDTV, it will have a VGA or DVI input.