An important point to mention is that it is the first open source eLoader that’s been released, in 4 years of PSP hacking. Many thanks for that This could probably become the base of future homebrew loaders, and this will at least be a useful source of information for lots of devs around here!

source and download: advancedPSP

Below are details for each model.

PSP Phat and PSP2000 (except ta88v3)

If you own a PSP Phat (PSP-1000), or a PSP Slim (PSP 2000) that is NOT a Ta88v3, then your PSP, independently of its firmware, is 100% hackable with a pandora battery. It’s been the case for many months now, and it will not change as the exploit used for the pandora batteries is a hardware exploit and cannot be fixed with a new firmware.

PSP-3000 and TA88v3, Firmware 5.03 and below

If you are the unlucky owner of a “doomed” motherboard, but happen to have a firmware 5.03 or below, your PSP is “half-hackable” through the laughing man tiff exploit and the associated Homebrew Enabler, better known as “ChickHEN”. “half-hackable” means that your PSP can have all the features of fully hackable PSPs (homebrew, plugins, customizable themes, ISOs,…), but unlike fully hacked PSPs, if your hard-reboot your PSP, you’ll have to run the hack again. (For those who still don’t know, putting your PSP in sleep mode works fine and is the best thing to do to keep the HEN in Ram)

PSP-3000 and TA88v3, Firmware 5.50 and above

There is no “public” way to hack these PSPs currently. However lots of exploits have been made public in the past weeks, giving developers enough material to actually work on solutions for these models. A user exploit in the Game Archer Maclean’s Mercury exists up to firmware 6.10. A user exploit in the Game Medal of Honor Heroes (including Medal Of honor heroes 2) exists up to firmware 5.55. The Kernel exploit used in ChickHEN exists up to firmware 5.50, but (is not usable from a user exploit in a game). A Kernel exploit revealed by MathieuLH exists up to firmware 5.55. Team Typhoon revealed the existence of a kernel exploit up to at least firmware 6.10, but didn’t make it public. Technically, with the current public available info, these PSPs could be hacked up to firmware 6.10 for Homebrew through the Mercury Game, and up to firmware 5.55 for HEN (isos, plugins,…) through the kernel exploit revealed by MathieuLH

PSP Go

There is no “public” way to hack these PSPs currently. The PSPGo cannot technically use exploits in games. Well…it can, but as soon as a game is hacked, it gets patched. So either you own a hackable version of the game and can use it, either you’re screwed. The general idea is that we cannot use games as a “good” user exploit source for the PSPGo. Exploits still exist though, and most of the time kernel exploits valid for a given firmware will work on the PSPGo, so it’s only a matter of finding a user exploit in the XMB rather than in a game.

Vocabulary

Homebrew: User made (non official) applications. These include games such as Wagic, utilities, emulators…
ISO: In the PSP world, digital copy of a game, most of the time unencrypted, preventing it from running on an Official firmware. ISOs are often associated to game piracy.
plugin: Homebrews that are loaded in the Ram of the PSP to extend its functionalities. For example, the music plugin allows to play MP3s while playing a game or a homebrew on the PSP.
HEN: Homebrew ENabler. A program that patches the PSP Ram to allow running unsigned code (Homebrews). unlike eLoader, a HEN is in the Ram and therefore doesn’t require to be launched everytime you want to run unsigned code. To do this a HEN usually requires a Kernel exploit.
TA88v3 :A Model of Motherboard that was introduced on the PSP2000 in summer 2008. It fixes the vulnerability used by the pandora batteries. Several techniques exist to identify your PSP Motherboard. If you have a PSP 2000, the easiest way to identify if it has a “doomed” motherboard is to try a pandora kit (battery + memory stick) on it.

Note: Firmware 5.05 has been intentionally not mentioned as it was released to a very limited number of people.

Sometimes, the result is not only brilliant, it is awesome. This is the case of the Theme “Final Saga” posted by Ilya B yesterday. I was amazed to see such a gorgeous and coherent theme. Pretty much all graphics have been redone, and the theme includes some really cool avatars. It’s not difficult to do better than the current default avatars in Wagic, but these ones are truly excellent. This is now the Theme I use on my PSP

How to install:

1. Download the theme here and put it in your “WTH/Res/themes” folder
2. Launch the game, and in the options > user, select the “Final Saga” Theme
3. There is a bug currently with fonts in Wagic 0.9.1, so if you want the theme fonts (I highly recommend them), download this additional file and extract it into your Res/graphics folder

Don’t hesitate to say thanks to Iliya B for this awesome work. And use the opportunity to browse the forums for extra contents

Matieuhlh, member of the team prometheus (the team who created the Pandora Batteries), and a respected hacker on the PSP scene, revealed that Freeplay actually stole the code from a private SVN. To prove this, Mathieulh released the original sources of the exploit, as well as the sources for a kernel exploit that has been patched in firmware 6.00.

Further development of these exploits will most likely lead to custom firmwares and/or HEN for PSPs up to the firmware 6.00. This is of course interesting only for owners of Ta88v3 and of PSP3000. Owners of PSPGo can still pray for a future XMB exploit, and owners of older models of PSPs can use pandora batteries, independently of their firmware. As usual, if you like homebrews, don’t upgrade. And avoid buying a PSPGo

People interested in working on these vulnerabilities (user and kernel) can download them here

Source:MForMature

This image is not hosted on wololo.net. All rights reserved Wizards of the Coast. wololo.net is not related to Wizards of the Coast. The terms 'Wizards', 'Coast', 'of', 'the', and 'Magic', are (tm) Hasbro. Elves were invented by Wizards of the Coast, and have not been a part of popular culture for centuries. Treefolks are not a copyright infrigement of Tolkien's work. It's a different word.

Rares, creator of MTGForge, recently received a DMCA notice asking him to remove some links to his game provided on his blog (hosted by google).

Why he received it is still unclear, but it seems his game is infringing some copyright owned by Wizards of the Coast (this needs to be confirmed).

Wizards of the Coast are well known for threatening lots of players, blog owners, and fan-made games.

MTGForge is a free, fan made java game that allows to play with a limited set of MTG cards against a limited AI. It doesn’t offer the same experience as any existing product sold by WotC, neither is it a competitor to their business. It brings attention to Magic the Gathering to a broader audience, and provides free promotion for MTG. WotC should make a difference between protecting their copyrights and attacking the people that help them.

Please do not hesitate to post this piece of news on your blog, or on forums dedicated to Magic The Gathering. Maybe if enough people talk about this bad behavior, Wizards will realize it can hurt their image to do a witch hunt against every fanmade game.

As far as I’m concerned, I believe that a game invented more than 15 years ago should be in the public domain, and WotC should create new games rather than relying on their cash cows (Magic and D&D). But that’s a different story.

I personally got threatened by WotC’s lawyers less than a year ago. Yet I regularly receive emails from people who’ve come back to Magic after playing Wagic, years after they stopped playing the original game…

I understand it’s a complex issue, and their lawyers are probably just doing their job. But in the end it’s all a matter of money. If it costs them more to insult their clients than letting us do our fan work in peace, they’ll stop. So spread the word, people.

PS: if Wagic or MTGForge have made you buy some WotC products (you hadn’t played the game in years and Wagic made you want more so you bought Zendikar cards and participated to an official draft event, or you own an XBox360 and wanted to try it out because the AI AI is a bit frustrating, etc…), please post your experience

Wagic now has 70’000 lines of code.

As a comparison, a “standard” Custom Firmware for the PSP has around 25’000 lines of code.

Out of curiosity, I ran CLOC on several open source projects of the PSP community and here are the results:

(3rd gen equiv. Is CLOC’s attempt at comparing projects written in various languages. It assumes for example that one line of assembly code does way less than one line of C, itself doing less than one line of C++)

What does this show? Well, pretty much nothing, except that the number of lines of code in a project are not directly related to its popularity

A “standard” homebrew game with basic features, that is still more than a “proof of concept” will have between 2’000 and 10’000 lines of C/C++ code (I didn’t try any LUA game).

A basic rule of thumb is that a programmer alone can maintain around 20’000 lines of code. The number of lines of code in a program give no specific indication on the quality of the code itself, but there are two obvious things: Maintenance and bugs increase with the number of lines of code. I’m not saying that Wagic has 15 times more bugs than Battleground 3, but that it is highly probable that Wagic has 2 times more bugs than when it had only 35’000 lines of code.

Well, if we want a project to grow bigger, add more features, at some point we have to increase the code size. What are the solutions to deal with it?

1. Version control. I can’t imagine a project with more than 10’000 lines of code that is not version controlled. We use SVN for Wagic, there’s a free service provided by google code for that. So far it’s great. Other projects use their own SVN servers (such as the PSP SDK at ps2dev). Other solutions such as Git exist. I don’t think any software project can expect to grow without at least a basic version control system
2. Bugs tracking. I used to write down every single bug on a piece of paper. This works half well when you’re alone on the project, assuming it’s always the same piece of paper. Let me withdraw that: it doesn’t work. You end up forgetting things. Inputting the bugs in a system that will help you keep records is a great idea. I’m happy we progressively shifted to that in the Wagic project. Google code offers this service as well. There are alternatives such as mantis,…
3. Automated tests. I gave up the idea of having human beings test every single feature in Wagic after the second release I think. There is no way you can get people test thousands of cards in an acceptable amount of time. Depending on the project, automated testing can be hard to implement. Unit tests are fairly easy to implement in languages such as Java, but I haven’t taken the time yet to implement unit tests in Wagic. Wagic does regression tests, which is basically a way of making sure that a new feature does not break old ones. We have lots of progress to do in this area
4. Reduce the quantity of source code. One other thing I haven’t taken the time to do seriously yet. The best solution to reduce maintenance is of course to reduce the size of stuff to maintain. Wagic has lots of dead code, or code that could be optimized/refactored. We try to do some cleanup regularly, for example by removing hardcoded cards, and instead softcode them (which also improves the parser, that’s a good thing). Often, cleaning up the card codes doesn’t reduce the total amount of code though. But it allows us to code 50 cards when it was only possible to code 1 initially.

These are the four things we use on a daily basis to work on Wagic, and that proved efficient over the months to increase the quality of the game. It is far from perfect of course. We are experimenting with other things (such as a wiki) to improve documentation and communication between devs…we’ll see how it goes.

But I’ve got a blog which allows me to write, complain and whine with other people actually reading what I write, and my post not getting lost in hundreds of others. I rock, ’cause I’m better than you

I’ve read all the comments on the MForumature thread. Yes, all of them. At the time I write this, there are 189 of them. What can I say, I love dramas…

At first I was disappointed that team Typhoon decided not to release their hack, but I believe they have their reasons. As a fellow developer I’ve encountered many times users who treated me like sh#t, forgetting that they were getting hundreds of hours of my work for free. These people, that we can call “ungrateful users” always want more, insult you instead of giving constructive feedback, and are usually the reason devs quit doing their stuff after a while. There are lots of them.

I was then surprised at the reaction of one of the members of Team Typhoon, who basically insulted everyone in the thread, which more or less ruined the point of the whole thing. When you want to prove to others that they are assholes, a rule of thumb is to not act like one yourself.

This is when I realized the reason I have been working on Wagic for more than 2 years now. Even if there are lots of “parasites” in the PSP “scene”, there are also lots of great people. In the two years I’ve been working on Wagic, I’ve had the opportunity to work with dozens of very talented people, from various horizons, not necessarily devs. People who give feedback, ideas, help any way they can…

Granted, I’m not a genius hacker, I only code homebrew, there’s way less pressure than for people who work on hacks. But still, my point is that for 100 dumb users, there’s 1 cool guy who’s gonna change your life. And I believe that it’s worth working for that one guy.

Another thing that happens frequently in that kind of drama thread is people stating that “it was better years before”. Actually it wasn’t. There’s always been such drama in the PSP scene. Here’s a quote that I like from the libtiff mailing list . This was posted when the first tiff hack for the PSP was revealed, back in 2005:

If only these people spent as much time on actual good documentation and specification of facts and exact vulnerability, as they do on fighting amongst themselves in SMS type language of wannabee hackers, we’d have a chance to know what is actually going on.

That was the Noobz era back then, and apparently from an external point of view the PSP scene was already full of crap. Yes, there was probably a time when hacking the PSP was more fun and less drama. That was probably when the only way to get one was to be a huge geek with access to japanese imports… in other words, when the PSP wasn’t a mainstream product… like…for the 3 first months after it was out. If you don’t want drama, go to the openpandora. Oh, and stop thinking all the “good devs are gone”. Yes, lots of good devs have moved on. But lots of good ones appeared recently too.

Why is there so much drama in the PSP scene? Well my theory is that the PSP is the most active console in terms of underground. I ran a few funny google searches…note that everyone can use google to backup their claims, so these results are probably worthless, but they’re still interesting:

“psp homebrew” gives me more than 2.3 million results in google. “DS Homebrew” has less than half of it (if you look for “PSP ISO” or “DS ISO” though, the number of results are roughly equivalent :12 and 13 million). I was recently discussing with Magixien, webmaster of PSPGen, one of the biggest “console underground” website out there, who told me that no other console is close to what the PSP scene is in terms of activity.

It is also funny to see that the first results for “DS Scene” and “Wii Scene” in google are sites that promote pirated games downloads. “PSP Scene” gives links to more serious sites that talk about PSP releases, hacks, and homebrews. I won’t give names, try it by yourself. Does it mean that piracy is the main goal for hackers on all consoles but the PSP? Well I doubt it, but it’s still a strange result…

What’s my point you ask? I don’t know, I forgot while I was typing… I guess, it’s: stop whining. If you want hacks for piracy, just go to hell, we don’t like you. If you think the PSP scene was better 3 years ago, nobody’s asking you to stay, you’re spoiling the party. If you think you’re better than others because you’re a hacker or one of their beta testers, just learn humility, it won’t hurt you.

If you disagree with me, I have the power to erase your comments, I’m almighty, muahahahaha… meh, ok, you can post…

It seems they found a user Exploit AND a kernel exploit on the 6.10 Firmware.

Bad news is, they don’t plan to release the exploit, for some reasons unknown yet (probably related to some other groups using their work for ISO Loading despite their strong requests not to do it).

(photo CC by kanjiroushi)

I wanted to introduce properly the new Themes mechanism that is now available in Wagic, but things got a bit out of hand, and instead, some dedicated people managed to get a full Starwars MOD ready a few days after Wagic 0.9 was released.

As you may already now, Wagic is a computer card game which is highly customizable. I think we can almost say that with enough work, you can create an entire new game without any programming skills. This is what this starwars MOD is about. Several hundred new cards, new graphics, new sounds, but still the same principle of collecting credits to improve your decks and beat the AI.

This starwars MOD is unofficial for now, but depending on its success, it might become officially supported (this means improvements and bug fixes). So if you download this and enjoy it, please say it!

This mod contains 4 sets of cards. 3 of these sets were created by Christopher French, aka Alacar Leoricar. The thread were he first released these sets can be found on MTGSalvation, I want to personally thank him for his enthusiasm about this small project, and I hope we’ll have opportunities to port more of his awesome sets to Wagic.

The fourth set was created by DarthGhadar and posted on our forums

The funny EBOOT picture was made by kanjiroushi

The mod initial design and theme is by Abrasax

A small team was able to create this mod in a matter of days with the latest Wagic version… I hope this will lead to More mods like this one. If you’re a fan of anime, or want to create your own graphics and universe, go for it! You can already check out some cool themes and custom sets on the forum.

The package includes Wagic 0.9.3, which is basically Wagic 0.9.1 with a couple bug fixes. The purple screen issue is, unfortunately, still here, but remember there are ways to get rid of it most of the time

Enjoy Wagic’s first full MOD, download here.

A package with the images can be found here. Alternatively, you can find them on the MTGSalvation thread.

Please report bugs here for now

Wagic is 100% fan work, and is not related to or endorsed by Lucasfilm or WotC.

There’s nothing to win, but the pride of showing your MTG deck construction skills. This is a very casual tournament, just for the fun of it.

You have 11 days to build a cool deck and submit it. The decks will then be automatically tested against each other through Wagic’s AI in several thousand matches. We will include the best performing decks in Wagic’s next release

Rules and subscriptions here, many thanks to Psyringe for organizing all this!