Bought a PSP

[Caydr]

In case of moderator suspicion, none of this is illegal or even legally questionable... yet. So here we go:

Last week on a whim I bought a PSP Slim. I bought it for homebrew and watching videos, and possibly playing official games but not more than 5% of the time...

There's quite a lot you can do with a PSP now and honestly I'm surprised at the quality and flexibility.

What prompted me to buy one? You can now get about 10 hours of battery life, or quite a lot more if you hack your PSP for unofficial functionality. That was the main thing that held me back. The other thing that made me not want one was the fact that it has almost no games that aren't done better somewhere else.

Basically what you can do now is, put in a self-modified battery that makes the PSP think it is in a repair shop. Then you push a button that makes it update its firmware to whatever is on your memory stick. Voila, you're running hacked firmware.

This works on ANY psp version released to date.

With that hacked firmware you can play homebrew, such as advanced video players, games, and various other applications. I'm mainly interested in Genesis, SNES, NES, and some other emulation, and also watching ripped TV on the go. There's also quite a few impressive ports of various open-source or old DOS games.

What I can help you with:
-Modifying your battery
-Installing firmware
-Finding some decent homebrew sites
-Ripping UMDs onto your memory card to play them without the drive wasting half your battery life
-Video conversion
-Various other stuff

DS is still the system to own for mobile gaming imho, but the PSP's screen (both its quality and size) makes it useful for a few things the DS's screens aren't up to snuff for. Also it has a much faster processor, improving the homebrew potential.

Honestly it seems like the PSP homebrew developers are a little lazy - with all that processing power, they're letting a lot of it go to waste. The DS's SNES and Genesis emulation is surprisingly good for such an "underpowered" system, and the PSP, with a processor about 10x faster, only manages about 2x the framerate in some cases. This makes me think it's more an issue with the developers not having enough time or experience to have made high quality homebrew so far - after all, the service-shop battery trick is a relatively recent invention and since it came to light there seems to have been a sharp increase in developer interest. Before this, you had to buy a certain game or open a certain type of image or buy PSPs manufactured before a certain date, etc, etc, etc... it was a mess.

For an example, right now I have:

-Daxter, Wipeout Pure, Burnout Legends (all PSP) ripped to my memory stick. (I own the originals; I ripped them myself using the hacked firmware, so I didn't even need to use file-sharing software and risk unintentionally sharing with dirty, dirty pirates)

-I also have several PS1 games ripped.

-One full 26-episode anime series

-One full 13-episode anime series

-Various youtube videos

-Several homebrew programs, notably a program called PMP Advance Player, which is a high-quality video player with super high compression and rapid seeking, etc, etc, very nice. Each anime episode comes to about 50mb, although for live action I would probably recommend a different codec since this one gets choppy when there's a lot of motion.

-SNES emulator with Super Metroid, Chrono Trigger, a few others

-Genesis emulator with Vectorman and many others

-Various other small things and homebrew games I haven't had a chance to try yet

So that's my unnecessarily long-winded post for tonight. I'm going to bed.

[nemppu]

cool

[clumsy_culhane]

cool

i think thats the most coherent thing that nemppu has ever posted..

[Comp1337]

Caydr: Topicstarter of destiny

Nah, but imo a PDA works just as good for watching anime or playing NES/SNES

[SinbadEV]

I have a PSP, I haven't gotten as far as the customer firmware thing because I just got the 2GB memory card for Christmas and my computer is having a heck of a time trying to write to it... it weird because my wifes computer has exactly the same mobo and it works fine when I connect it to hers... grumble... right now I have on my 32 meg card, 3 ebooks and bookr to read them, an NES emulator and a handful of games and the eLoader tiff-mode exploit.

The not being able to use my 2GB card thing is pissing me off an awful lot... I mean why can I write to a 32MB but not to e 2GB? ... I had a similar issue trying to copy files from my wifes 2GB card she has for her quickshot digital camera...

[kiki]

cool

i think thats the most coherent thing that nemppu has ever posted..

very tru.


Cool caydr, ill send this info to my friend. He thought the newest ones were not haxable.

[Caydr]

You open up your battery and break one of the pins off one of the chips on the pcb. You open the battery VERY CAREFUL-LIKE, because if you ram stuff in there in the wrong direction you'll pierce the lithium cells and start a fire.

I learned this AFTER I had already opened mine so I must be really lucky ^^

Anyway if anyone wants my "Pandora Battery" I'll mail it for the cost of shipping... Once you've pandora'd it via the hard method (you can also modify its built-in firmware somehow if you already have a hacked PSP but I didn't so I had to use the hard-mod) it's no longer usable as a battery. It may only fit in the Slim model though, I'm not 100% sure.

Slim: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKFnuCfTPZo