uOFW – The unofficial Official Firmware For PSP back from the dead
Lately everyone’s been so busy with the Vita scene that we’ve been forgetting about the PSP’s existence. It’s 2014, and homebrews are still coming! uOFW is one of my favorites, and I’m sure many of you would also be interested. This project aims to reverse engineer parts of the PSP’s kernel. This’ll help us to know more about how Operating Systems work in general, and allow us to run any unsigned content without having to sign them. We can basically create our own “Official" firmware, that’s right official. (At least that’s what Felix – who’s behind the project – told me)
2 Months ago, Felix Dev (Author of the project along with artart78) mentioned that the project wouldn’t be able to go any further due to the lack of time and support.
I quote:
Hey folks,
Sadly, I don’t think the project will go much further in the future, as nearly every work on it has been stopped. In the upcoming weeks, I’ll upload a working version of the mediaman module which is probably the only module you guys should expect to be uploaded to the Github repository in the foreseeable future.
End of contribution to the uOFW project won’t result in the repository being shut down and everyone is still welcome to add information to it.
Furthermore, if you want to chat with us, we can still be found in our #uofw IRC channel as of now.uOFW was a great project, and believe me when I say it was a lot of fun, however, the lack of time and support killed it in the end.
We could probably revive it as part of a PS Vita project, but we are nowhere near that any time soon.
On behalf of the uOFW team, I would like to thank everyone who gave us his support throughout these past months and years!
However they have gotten a few developers willing to contribute to the project recently and they’re back in action! 🙂 This is one of the most ambitious projects ever for the PSP. A full reverse engineering of the official PSP firmware! You can follow all their updates here: https://github.com/uofw
They are currently working on reverse engineering the two following modules:
- sceIdStorage: https://github.com/uofw/uofw/tree/idstorage
- module manager: https://github.com/uofw/uofw/tree/modulemgr_updated
Also be sure to check their module status list here: https://github.com/uofw/uofw/wiki/Current-Modules-Status. For a more up-to-date info on modules being worked on, check here https://github.com/uofw/uofw/branches.
If any developers are interested and willing to contribute, you may contact the team via IRC on the FreeNode server (irc.freenode.net) (join the channel #uofw) Or via e-mail at the team’s common email address uofwteam@gmail.com
This project makes so much sense for PSP homebrew, it’s almost all there’s left to do.
Can someone donate me a psn card code? Please i NEED it badpy javancehooks@gmail.com
XG3T-XXXA-XJ0B
Oh wow lol
Burn! XD
Creative, inspiring. 10/10
Haha good one. 😀
Lolz, do you think he even understood it? 😆
Lol, I wish I implemented an upvote option in the comments.
word… I agree, other than trolls abusing it… unless it’s just a counter with no real effect…
lol dude that was so funny im putting this as my sig if you dont mind
When you will release hack homebrew for ps vita 🙁
What hack are you talking about? the ninja releases?
So, what’s the point of this exactly? Official firmware is strict, and has limits. Custom firmware allows you to run unsigned code and all that, so what’s this do that makes it so different? This allows you to run unsigned code as well, so I wonder what makes this different. Is it basically just like a different way to use alternative firmware? Any explanation would be awesome. And yeah Vita master, I’m in line waiting for that as well too. If we could just find a way to easily add/remove files from the PS Vita, that alone would be immensely helpful.
May the related post help you…
http://wololo.net/2012/11/14/uofw-the-alternate-firmware-project-for-the-psp/
you could say that the point is completely understanding the system, even more than right now.
Im notbeing ungrateful and this is great for psp users,but why are people still developing for psp?This work and time would be great for vitas progress.Also,does anyone know where yifan lu is,hes not posting anymore??
Check my post history before making such claims.
Quite simply, because they want to. It’s obviously a project they have an interest in.
Because there are some guys still working on the NES or PS1, so why not?
Yifan is always around. He just never babbles about ***.
Can someone please please please figure out the fix for no ps1 sound on PS Vita TNV
wow, PSP is revive
Plot twist: It never died pal.
We all have our faith in you, Yifan Lu. I think he was worried you’d potentially left the vita scene or something. You’ve made some fantastic discoveries, even if we’re still miles behind a native vita hack. I’m pretty sure people believe in you more than Katsu or Koala.
Lol Koala haha
Reminds me of Utopia: project that Mathieulh (And a few others?) were creating what, 6 years ago?
A real shame that ended up getting abandoned. Now that would have been amazing.
Yeah both projects had the same purpose. Except utopia was based on an older firmware, so Felix and artart decided to start from scratch using the latest ofw.
If only we could get the original members of Utopia to work with us, the project would quickly improve.
If only. What happened to them anyway? Isn’t there any sort of way to contact them. I’m not sure who they are though.
Mathieulh is still active on twitter, I don’t know about any other people who worked on it.
Davee is very often connected on our channel, though he is not involved (yet).
I think the main Utopia developer was SilverSpring, and he completely disappeared, apparently because his job made him too busy. It’s quite sad, because he was a really good developer.
It’s nice to see such a project actually still going on.
About Utopia, it was slightly different as Utopia’s main goal was to provide a small (lightweight microkernel) kernel based on a reverse engineering of the official psp modules that would run homebrews regardless of future sony psp updates (at the time) without any “useless” modules such as UMD or without the goal to run the vsh (the kernel was dedicated to homebrews)
All the while being opensourced.
uOFW seems to actually be an entire port/reverse engineer of the whole sony psp firmware (from my understanding), while it seems like an interesting goal, I am not sure how realistic that can be.
I do agree that this seems like the ultimate frontier as far as legacy psp hardware support goes (knowing that sony is most likely not to release updates again).
Either way, I wish you the best of luck with that endeavor 🙂
Why not join them? They are in need of more devs 🙂
Well they’re doing pretty good actually, but more devs = faster process. (Depending on their knowledge)
The goal of uOFW is a bit different because the main purpose is not to run homebrews (CFWs do that stuff very well) but to understand how the PSP and the PSP firmware work better, to enhance our understanding of the console and allowing stuff that wouldn’t have been allowed before (like a completely custom firmware, or low-level hacks made really easy).
While RE’ing the whole firmware seems unrealistic, a significant part of the low-level modules is clearly in our reach. Which is why we will RE the UMD modules but probably never the VSH ones.
Thank you for your support. I’ve been very busy for the previous two years, but I hope I’ll be able to work on uOFW again in the summer. 🙂
I will have faith in this development,uOFW,here i come!!!!!!!!!