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Tue, 15 Jul 2008
This comes up on occasion, so I thought I might put a reply here rather than in private; doubly so since I've always pushed for folks to consider ethical and legal implications of their actions and have probably ranted on it before. (ie: As software developers, I believe we must be careful to do the Right Thing, since the implications of our work could cause much aggravation or annoyance. This is why it should always default to 'No' to the question 'Do you wish to format your hard drive?' More, it comes up with increasing frequency in todays busy business world and sometimes we have to stand up for the user and consumer, right?)
Anyway, for purposes of this discussion, 'modding' refers to simply reflashing your PSP game consoles firmware.. something Sony will ask you to do all the time, as they publish updates. The trick is, you can reflash it with Sony's official firmwares, or the more questionable firmware 'mods' you can download online.
First.. why would you do it, knowing there is some risk you might do it wrong and 'brick' (kill) your device?
(Note that nowadays there is little risk; even if 'bricked', you can usually unbrick your device trivially.)
- Principles: When you buy yourself a Ford Mustang, you can put in any seat covers you like, not just what Ford tells you; this seems obvious, but in electronics the vendors are increasingly locking you down. The public at large tends not to care since it is but a small thing, and they're getting used to it. But taken in the light of your car, it would be intolerable. The essence of it is .. if you've bought something and fully own it, you can do to it what you like pretty much. Its the Tinkerer's Right. You can take it apart, and if you break it, its your problem :) Where would our society be if we never fiddled, improved or fixed anything ourselves? There was a time when we changed our own oil in the car..
- Practical: Sony artificilaly limits some aspects of the system, to be pricks. Consider -- video playback is low resolution and low quality, unless it is from officially purchased UMD videos. So while they advertise the device as a multimedia playback unit, and encourage you to play videos on it, they make them crappy. Thats pretty bad behaviour on their part, and borderline questionable to boot .. the old bait and switch. Anyway, using a modded firmware will ditch this little limit and enable full video playback from UMD or from your own video files. This is not the only little shaft that Sony has built into the system for their benefit, and not yours.
- Practical things: You can run homebrew, which is to say .. people release free applicatons, be they games, utilities or whatever, all the time. With the official firmware, you cannot run these. Sony is anal. This is the main treat .. you can play peoples new little games, ported games, and so on. Some great stuff (and a whole lot of crap.) More, you can develop yourself with an open source SDK .. you can write your own little games and explore your handheld console. Heck, this could be your break into the gaming industry, right? (Try the open source gp2x console as well, since it just runs Linux and SDL; life is easier there, and no fighting with the company. Watch for the upcoming Pandora console as well, at www.openpandora.org!)
- Practical: You can run 'disc images' (.iso and .cso files); this is not piracy. UMD disc games boot and load slow and eat a lot of battery power. Usually this is fine but some games take their sweet minutes to load, plus numerous load-times in-game which gets on your nerves; further, UMD games take up a lot of space so you can't generally care more than 1 with you. There are simple utilities to let you record the UMD disc into a .iso or file listing, and then you can boot them on your modded PSP. This is handy as hell. I've recorded a dozen of my UMD games and can keep a rotation of a half dozen on my Sony memory stick. All legal, and certainly ethical and useful. (If you go giving your .iso files to other people, you are then participating in piracy. I'm super small peanut, but I'm a developer who makes a living selling software. Please don't pirate it :)
There are more things as well, but that should cover why most people do it. I'm not going to go into how, as it can be easy or a right pain depending on your skill set, if you know someone who has done it, and so on. Ask me if you want some instruction and maybe I can sort it out for you but in general I worked out some methods for myself and do that. I don't really follow 'the scene' as it takes a lot of time, and 3/4 of the sceners are idiot kiddies :) (This is one thing I've commented on before.. when you get into some of these things for all the right reasons, you still have to be mindful that others are less kocher than yourself, like going to a seedier hotel.)
Anyway, all the above is just sillyness.. I really only wanted to pass a few notes to a friend, which would be:
- "EBoots" are the executables in PSP land. When you build a homebrew app, you're releasing an EBOOT file which is somethign the PSP will recognize as runnable. In general you create a directory on a memstick in /PSP/GAMES/ such as /PSP/GAMES/WANKER and stick your Eboot.pbp in there. Most homebrew comes in a zip file with the needed hierarchy to make it obvious.
- .iso is same as any other .iso around; a .cso is a compressed .iso, and there are stdio source files floating around for a tool to convert iso to cso and back, which can be handy; some people will 'rip' a UMD to .iso and attempt to extract the movie parts and such to reduce size, but thats work. I just rip the UMD to a .iso, and then run it through the .cso converter on my FreeBSD box, and good to go. Can reduce a file by some 10-50% depending how lucky you are. Anyway, you stick your .iso files in a top level directory .. /ISO or something I forget. Since the bay I've not had time to be ripping UMDs so have suffered carrying one around (Indiana Jones LEGO lately natch), but if you've got the time, slap your .iso's on the memstick.)
- Note for PSP Fat/Slim differences; the PSP Fat (original heavier) unit had less protection in it, so applications could run in kernel or user mode, among other things. The display driver and such is also a little different and so on. In essence, in moving from Fat to Slim, Sony created a branch for people who are hitting the hardware more directly or using the open source SDK which assumed it could work a certain way. Naturally UMD official games were not impacted. Anyway, when looking for homebrew, look for more recently updated versions of an application, or ones noted as being Slim versions or Slim compatible. Some applications built before the Slim existed only work on the Fat models, but most applications of note have long since been converted to work on both, or come in two builds.
- You might see references to firmware 1.50, since it was the most 'open' of the official firmware.. easily exploited. To this dat, PSP Fat owners's can have their modded firmware trick the system by keeping a copy of 1.50 on their system as _well as_ the more recent version of the firmware, and then booting up homebrew under the old firmware kernel, while booting new UMDs on a more recent version (essentially.) For PSP Slim, you _can_ do this, but its a little tricky and generally not needed since everything is updated to the newer kernel versions anyway, as mentioned above. But I thought I would clarify.
So all this verbiage above serves merely to confuse anyone reading. But there you go.
[ Category: / entertainment / gaming / psp ] [link] [Comments]