Custom Firmware For the PSP-3000 Released 97
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."
Re:Uses (Score:2, Interesting)
Why don't they allow homebrew then? They let people install Linux on their PS3. Why not let them do the same on their PSP? It's not only that they don't want people copying games.
Pandora (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Uses (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Get the PSP 300 now! (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Piracy, Shmiracy (Score:3, Interesting)
The PSP has been a known pirate haven for years and has been running on almost nothing but. Most early news reports suggested piracy was what kept the console alive.
Re:Uses (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Hey now (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Uses (Score:3, Interesting)
Just to make a point of this and to the GP post, I have run CFW on my PSP fat for years. I have not pirated a single game during this time.
I've written posts about this before when people start with this nonsense but here are the reasons why I run CFW:
I go on overseas assignments that run ~9 months. I like my game library with me and that's about 30-40 games. 30 UMDs in even the most space efficient case is still a lot of space for me since I live out of a backpack and a duffel bag. I rip every UMD and carry my entire PSP game library on either my laptop and/or external HD. Running off of the MS PD gives me several advantages on top of the space savings:
- Less power consumption, longer batter time (though not as much as some claim) which is a double plus because I often don't have access to consistent electricity.
- Less load time on most titles (some take about the same amount of time UMD vs MS)
- Originals are at home, where they stand less of a chance of being stolen.
- Often, I work in extremely dusty environments. UMDs and dust don't mix.
When I'm at home in the US, Europe or Korea, I don't play many games on my PSP and usually it runs as a secondary display on my XP machine. This is the only homebrew I run on a regular basis. Sometimes, I tinker with uClinux. If I had the patience and the same technical bent I had back in college, I'd probably be trying to shoehorn NetBSD on somehow.
So there. You now know at least one person who does not and has never pirated a single PSP game, yet runs CFW for a number of purposes.
If you knew my brother (also US Army), you'd know two guys who don't pirate games and run CFW. Though he runs emulators. He's one of those guys who still has every NES/SNES cartridge he ever owned so you can't even accuse him of pirating ROMs.