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PSP: How-to homebrew on a recent PSP (firmware 2.6 say), Or, Downdating, Downgrading, Whatever
Tue, 11 Jul 2006

When buying a car, I'm sure most people assume it can offroad if necessary - to park on the grass for a concert or party or go game hunting in the deep savannah .. at least to go where they tell it. Likewise, when you buy a Phillips VCR or DVD player you can safely expect it to play home movies, or videos published by someone other than Phillips.

Another long entry typed in on a cellphone :) This one is light on details since I'm not trying to be technical or delve into the many obscure interesting things going on over the last year or two.

The story so far..

There is no precedent or protection for this sort of 'getting under the hood' activity in many electronics arenas so one has to be careful. An iPod can play open standards like mp3s, but if you buy from the iTunes store you'll get a locked-down music file that isn't playable on anything but an iPod (we call this vendor lock-in.) With a car, you can go to any mechanic or fix things yourself, but not with your game consoles. Anyway, when I decided to acquire a Sony PSP mobile game console I was careful to get an older wide open model, since I intended to get it for personal development sake and to have the option of playing some modern games now and again (I do a lot of retro, but I thought it would be nice to have the option to play something made in the last year, not just in the last decade .. without taking away the TV set from my dear wife :) I was holding off on a PSP since they were too pricey at launch, but Sony was popping out updated firmware (operating systems) for the unit, making it harder and harder to develop for.. so bought at the last possible second to get an older unit. (I'm glossing over a lot of details here; feel free to ask if you want to know about the nitty gritty, but this is a family blog ;)

The PSP back then was great fun to develop for - its a fantastic piece of hardware and a wonderful playground to mess with a modern graphics processor (GPU), and a great platform to host homebrew and emulators. I also picked up a few great games - Lumines, Wipeout:Pure, good times. Naturally, Sony started publishing games that required newer firmware versions in your PSP (SOCOM, say), and buying a game would force you to upgrade your PSP (takes only a minute), or not try the game. After awhile I tired of fighting with Sony and picked up a new game I'd been eyeing and got my PSP 'upgraded', and thus ended my homebrew development for the platform -- why fight so hard to publish free software in support of a company who works very hard to shut you out? I bought the PSP for homebrew and modern games, but decided to settle on modern games and use the wide open and open source GP2X console for all homebrew. Naturally, with Sony's rootkit and other rediculous crap going on, a bitter taste was left in my mouth so I will steer clear of all Sony products in the future.. but I already had this gadget and aside from Sony.. its a great device. I'm not into piracy, but I do make homebrew.. so when Sony tries to step on my toes and tell me which roads my car can drive on.. forget it.

I've always been against a Philosophy of Retardation -- to design limits into a system when you distrust your users to have their own ethics. I always preach the opposite opposite -- Philsophy of Empowerment - users deserve respect; give them good powerful flexible tools and they will create and extend beyond what the developer originally envisioned. This is why my for sale tools use open standards where possible and why I encourage people to hack around.. and why what began as a handheld list application can now read RSS news feeds!

Downdating

Despite Sony's best attempts, every once in awhile some brave folks would hack away at their devices and find ways to 'downgrade' their firmware.. to roll back from firmware 2.00 to 1.50 say. This is technically a downgrade, but since it enables homebrew then the 'scene' folks prefer the term downdate since it is conceptually an upgrade in many ways.

For a long time, firmware 1.00 and 1.50 were the big ones - pretty much wide open for homebrew users and developers. Firmware 2.00 was trouble for awhile when released but got a little opened up by the dev community, and later firmware revisions were either trouble or totally locked down.. until very recently. Just a couple weeks back an exploit in 2.6 (probably the most common post-1.5 firmware in circulation) was discovered and recently a downdater has been developed so for the first time PSP owners with a 2.6 firmware can upgrade their device to an older firmware such as 1.50 -- so they're again wide open for homebrew. Happy days! (Search the various psp sites for 'downdater' and you'll locate the 2.5/2.6 jobbie to do it.)

I naturally distrust this sort of thing, since I don't wish to 'brick' (kill) my PSP.. so I waited a week for reports to flow in of success in the downdate process. (I'd gone from 1.50 to 2.0 and back a few times, but since getting bumped up to 2.6 for Katamari I'd not tried any homebrew since it was so unpleasant to get going.. thanks Sony!) Today I downdated back to the beloved 1.5 version, and fired up my CaSTaway/PSP emulator.. good times are here again.

Of course, the question remains.. how does one play newer purchased games on a now 1.5 firmware PSP? Now that my old code works again and I can merge my PSP and GP2x development trees... are games still viable?

NOTE: Downdating works on many but not all models of PSP; be sure to verify you're good to go before firing up the process!

Devhook

This is the key; I was not interested in having two PSPs (an old firmware one and a new firmware one), nor in giving up the games I'd bought on UMD (the disks you buy at the store) which is why I updated at all. Downdating to 1.50 means you nolonger can fire up most of the halfway recent game UMDs...

Devhook is a groovy tool that has been developed which enables one to load up a newer firmware (currently up to 2.6) without re-flashing the PSP. So now we can be running 1.50, load up 2.6 and then fire up the UMD game of our choice. This is the sweet spot, until the next round of games come out and require the 2.7 firmware.. but perhaps the dev scene will figure out another workaround by then. As always, if not, at least so far we've got up to 2.6 covered so theres a lot of good commercial games available, and you can again have homebrew.

One thing I feel I should note .. while many of these tools are developer oriented, or homebrew playing oriented, many are also crack oriented; devhook is a pretty swanky tool, but its usually packaged up as an .ISO (usually from warez) loader.. I don't endorse that sort of thing (though ripping your UMD's to your own .ISO's is fine, and can be a good idea) but you have to be ready to see it when you delve into these sorts of tools.

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