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

[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

[V50]

I don't doubt you, but I would wager that the people you know aren't particularly representative of the gaming community as a whole. (Not that I or any of us really have a great cross-section of anything known to us.)

My experience, with people from my work (Canadian Army) is that every single person who has run custom firmware on the PSP/DS has done so with the intention of running pirated games.

Anyway, in general, people can say what they want about rights to run stuff on their own hardware, etc. 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.

People can argue all they want that people pirating DS/PSP games don't result in lost sales (I don't buy that, but whatever), but the presence of much PSP/DS piracy appears to be scaring developers away, resulting in less handheld games, particularly for the PSP. :(

Among (several) other reasons, massive piracy is one major cause, IMO, for the large shift away from PC gaming, towards consoles. I don't want to see the same happen to the handhelds.

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

[marcansoft]

As a prior Wii homebrew developer, I have absolutely no doubt that 99% of its users are just doing it to run crappy piracy tools. It's one of the reasons why I gave up on console homebrew and Wii homebrew in particular.

Then there's the thing where the main Wii homebrew library largely consists of code ripped straight out of the Nintendo SDK (most of the drivers and frameworks have the same API with the same code, just manually translated line by line from assembler to C - the only decent documentation for the "homebrew" graphics API is the SDK documentation itself). Nobody knew at first, since the guy responsible conveniently forgot to tell anyone. Now everyone just pretends the problem doesn't exist. No one dares to work on an alternative - even people who otherwise hate the library due to its failures. So in the end just about every homebrew binary for the Wii is a big SDK copyright violation. Kind of like the Xbox 1 situation where everyone used the SDK, except people there knew it was illegal and distributed the binaries underground, whereas here everyone just plugs their ears when the libogc issue is mentioned.

And people wonder why console homebrew has so much trouble attracting sane good developers.

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.

Piracy, Shmiracy

[Sick Boy]

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.

Re:Piracy, Shmiracy

[skreeech]

you can run FFVII on CFW
you need to use the recovery menu to select "use version.txt" then usb toggle flash0 find version.txt and change all 5.00 or 500 to 5.50/550

I have not gotten FFVII but it worked for Fire pro wrestling G off the japanese store.

Pandora

[EEPROMS]

You can go save your self some time and buy a Pandora with hardware specs 2-3 times better and totally open for hacking.

Re:Pandora

[Anonymous Coward]

For twice the price, and without the PSP's great library of commercial games. Not to mention that waiting months for a piece of hardware to be released is hardly what I'd consider saving time.

It's Not Really "Custom Firmware"

[rsmith-mac]

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.