I’ve decided that it’s time to try and get some use out of my PSP; I don’t think it’s seen the light of day in over a year now! Apparently with the right firmware I can play my old PS1 games on it. I found a good guide at PSP-Hacks.com. It was a pretty painless experience truth be told — even though I don’t use the thing I still didn’t fancy turning it into a £100 paper weight! The worst part of the downgrade is when the PSP shuts down and the downdate is being applied. Thankfully everything ran smoothly and the whole process took less than 5 minutes. You can download the Easy Downgrader for version 3.5/2.6 PSP’s from PSP-Hacks — it’s a great app that takes you step by step through the entire process.

First on my to-do list was to get some emulators up and running, courtesy of Easy Emu Nstaller v0.1.2. MAME4ALLPSP was pretty poor and I removed it after trying out a number of ROMs; An Amiga Emulator (PSPUAE) proved similarly weak; but the Megadrive emulator (DGEN For PSP) worked a treat. After a quick blast on Streets of Rage I decided to look a little deeper into what was going on in the scene; the first thing that grabbed me was DevHook:

Device Hook (or DevHook for short) is a Homebrew App for PSPs running the 1.5 Firmware. DevHook is used to play your backed-up Game ISOs from your memory stick, or your UMDs. It can run every game up to date. DevHook also emulates the latest firmwares, including 3.03, giving you the ability to use the newest firmware perks! Web Browser, RSS Feed, LocationFree Player, Windows Media Audio (WMA) File support, Flash Player! All are functional! There is no risk in bricking your PSP either, as everything runs off your memory card!”

A more recent development which seems to have made most of what I read about redundant is that of custom firmware, tomorrow I think I will have a go at installing Dark_aleX’s 3.10 OE firmware:

Custom firmware is also a new development. These require firmware 1.5 to install, as to do so involves writing to the PSP’s flash memory, and 1.5 is the safest firmware to do so from. Not to be confused with official Sony firmwares, custom firmwares allow us to have some of the best features that Sony would never allow. Custom Firmware allows you to have recovery mode, so the PSP can be brought back in the event that it is ever bricked.

I found a great introduction/overview to the entire PSP homebrew PSP setup in The Big PSP Guide, on PSP-Hacks forums.