Sony Playstation Portable and the hacking scene – 9 Years of Development
The Sony PSP (Playstation Portable) first officially launched on December 12, 2004 in Japan. It has one of the biggest console development scenes ever.
Hackers first began to discover exploits in the PSP that can be used to run unsigned code. On 15th June 2005 the hackers distributed the cracked code of the PSP on the internet. They would refuse to apply updates which would render their hacks unusable and so Sony attempted to convince users that there was an advantage to updating by including a few new features in each firmware update.
This game of cat and mouse went on till 2007, when former hacker Dark_AleX had discontinued his work on the PSP, citing perceived problems with Sony as one of the reasons for his withdrawal. Urban legends said that he was paid by Sony not to release any more custom firmware.
Here’s a picture of a PSP running unsigned content.
Hello World on a PSP 1000
After Dark_AleX left, the PSP Scene almost vanished, due to the inability to crack the most recent firmwares. It was around that time that HBL was introduced. Its purpose was to allow you to run homebrews, but with no support to piracy. It served its purpose pretty well, and hackers were able to use it to once again run unsigned content. Thanks to m0skit0 and ab5000 who released an alpha version, which was initially created for the Medal of Honor Heroes exploit.
HBL was subsequently ported to several other user-mode exploits, and also served as base for other projects, like the PRO CFW project. When the Patapon 2 demo exploit was found and leaked, wololo had joined the project and began porting it to the latest firmware at that time. (6.20) And a couple months later TN, had got up his HEN (Homebrew Enabler) running using the Patapon exploit, and thus the PSP Custom firmware scene continued making its progress, with two alternate custom firmwares PRO and ME.
It’s tough to summarize 10 years of hacking, apologies for the summary above that intentionally ignores many aspects of the scene’s history. But the main point of this article is to convince users that PSP Scene still hasn’t given in as yet. Although it’s been 10 years since the console first officially launched in Japan, there are still some pretty interesting projects being worked on. This article won’t really amuse any Vita users, since it’s mainly focused on the PSP, but hey! The Vita scene is pretty much non-existent compared to the old PSP scene. That’s because all vita homebrew run in a PSP Sandbox anyway, which is called eCFW. (Emulated custom firmware)
What it basically does is that it allows to run PSP homebrews, via a psp emulator. It also emulates psp’s XMB. (Seen on TN-V) So we can say that part of the PSP still lives on within its younger brother, the PS Vita. 😛 However I’m afraid, once the vita stops depending on PSP’s emulation for running unsigned content, this might inflict the PSP Scene. As most of the projects, are being worked on using the PSP SDK, it might divert developer’s interest once the Vita makes its way on its own.
As you can already tell from reading my blog posts, yes I’m a PSP guy. (Long live #Team PSP ) I’ve always supported the PSP scene ever since I’ve got one. I’ve only had one which is a PSP Go, and I still have and use it. I’ll give you a brief insight of what’s going on in the PSP scene today.
Here are some projects that are promising enough to look forward to:
- uOFW – The Reverse Enginerring of the Low Level PSP Modules
- RetroArch – A Multi System Emulator being ported to PSP.
- PSP Module Analyzer
- Create plugins using Lua(a programming language that is much less complicated than C).
- Daedalus – An N64 Emulator.
- One Lua – A brand new Lua Interpreter, based on OSLib
- Lamecraft Mods, still being continued.
- Pokemon Jade/Obsidian.
Who knows there also might be some other interesting stuff that hasn’t been released to the public.
Oh and also, I don’t know if anyone’s interested, but I’m slowly working on a project called CyanogenMod PSP-C. I don’t think it’s that important, but my goal is to make it like something similar to iRShell. Before you ask, no, it’s not an official port and it won’t allow you to run android apps. It’s just an advanced GUI menu(Like 138 menu and py menu, seen on the vita), that’ll allow you to do everything a PSP can do, with a few extra goodies, that influences the design of CyanogenMod roms seen on Android.
Anyways I guess I’ll wrap this up here. I wanna take the time out to thank all the devs, for making the PSP scene into what it is today. You guys know who you are. I don’t mean just the developers who have worked on programming custom firmware, homebrew loaders and stuff, but also those who developed homebrews and emulators that kept the scene going. I wouldn’t have gotten one if it wasn’t for you guys. Seriously, the PSP SDK, and all these homebrews are brilliant! It’s incredible how they managed to do this from scratch. Even Sony finds it amusing, as stated by Jack Tretton:
I think that is something that is in the works. We certainly see some of the stuff that has been done via homebrew, and it’s incredibly creative. And I think we’d like to try and tap into that a little bit more.
I Hope you guys find this article interesting to read. Be sure to share your thoughts about the past or current PSP scene below.
This article bought back old memories.
the way we all use to play around with our PSP and taking it with us every where we went.
the good ol’ Emulators and memory speed up mods were awesome.
i hope something similar happens to vita too.
it will be awesome for vita to have its own code running 🙂
PSP Hacking was interesting then everytime there is something new.
I agree, looking at the forums, I always stumbled across new content. Miss the old times :/
Dat Flashback font.
Little irrelevant but i decided to post this here. Is anyone capable of writing a how-to(a guide) find a kernel exploit inside the psp emu on the vita? Like wololos guide on finding usermode ones but about the kernel. Maybe some1 like wololo, Acid_Snake , fate6 or qwickrazor86??
Thanks in advance.
There are a handful of people capable. The thing is, most of the information regarding kernel exploits are ready available. I don’t think anyone’s going to take time to sit down and write another one.
What if someone used a cheatcoder on the psp to create a exploit. almost in a way to make a directory in the save file?
Eigenmath on psp by hikari.uiharu: http://www.cncalc.org/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=10419
Sorry I didn’t know about this. Maybe if it was posted in the forums I would have. It looks pretty good though 🙂
Why are you wasting your time hacking psp when vita has so much power
The low power and graphics of psp are just a waste of vita power every game runs pixilated
Your work is good but just not worth spending money knowing it will be patched in next update
First off, I’m not ‘hacking psp’ I’m developing homebrew for it. I honestly don’t care about the Vita. I don’t have one, and I wont get one. That doesn’t mean I hate it. I just don’t want one, I prefer waiting for the next gen portable console. And for the record PSP isn’t a waste, like I said in my blog post, “Vita users won’t really find this amusing”. If it was a waste why have so many people, put so much effort and interest to create what it is today? The old PSP hacking scene > PS Vita hacking scene, everyone knows it.
Back when the PSP was introduced, there was literally no other handheld to offer THAT much power “under the hood”. While the PS Vita has 4 times the power of the PSP (and maybe even more), it failed to offer that WOW factor that the PSP offered, and for obvious reasons. Afterall, we’re 2 years into the PS Vita and still haven’t seen a single “must-buy” game on it. Okay, maybe God Eater 2, but that’s it. 2 years into the PSP and we’ve had GTA, Midnight Club, 2-3 Need for speeds, Metal Gear etc.
And don’t forget this: if the PSP wasn’t released, you guys wouldn’t have your precious Vitas.
One last thing, I don’t know about you & your eyes, but the PSP games look very vibrant and crisp on its own screen, and not “every game runs pixilated”. Long live the PSP, and thank you to people like Joel16 for keeping such an awesome handheld alive!
Haha you cleared up pretty much everything. I also forgot to mention it’s not just the PSP hackers, and homebrew developers that made it a great community, but supporters like you, who gave them a reason to keep coding 🙂
I didn’t really do much here lol, I tried, but I’m noting compared to all the other developers who have contributed to such a wonderful development scene 🙂
Like you said, Long live the PSP!
intresting
but why no android emulator …
even if it would be bochs running android-x86 😉
I think it’s cause the PSP lacks an MMU. And therfore we can’t run linux which requires an MMU. (Memory Management Unit)
Wait I just read the bochs bit, idk too much about it lol. I guess it’s cause the PSP doesn’t have much power.
Really interested in the uOFW project. I hope that it picks up some steam.
Same here 🙂
Oh those long nights of making ctf themes & gamebot! 😀 signing homebrews lol those were fun xD
Tell me about it!
You were right, this didn’t amuse this vita user. Although I was a psp user back in 2006-11.
I’ve been a PSP user since 2011
Dark_alex may have left the scene but he did come back for m33 cfw, which you totally missed in this article. There is a very large gap between Dark_alex leaving and HBL being made that you seemed to have ignore completely.
Like I said “It’s tough to summarize 10 years of hacking, apologies for the summary above that intentionally ignores many aspects of the scene’s history. But the main point of this article is to convince users that PSP Scene still hasn’t given in as yet.”
I did read that part, but it is a bit of disinformation saying the the psp scene died after he left. Which he never technically did and still managed to bring out awesome releases on a fairly good schedule.
I know but I didn’t want get into too much detail about the past. I wanted to convince users that the scene is still alive and ‘this’ is what’s going on around here. I was just giving them a ‘brief’ insight, about how it used to be and how it is now. I know I haven’t covered everything(I apologize for that), I only covered as much as I knew.
That’s fine man, sorry if I got a bit narky about this. My statement was mainly directed at the people who wanted more information and to also inform others that there was more to the psp scene than stated. M33 Firmware was a great addition to the homebrew scene and has been missed in nearly every article on this site detailing the history of psp hacking.
PSP cfw days were very exciting it’s like seeing a cat and mouse game between sony and the scene.
Nice article men i used to have my own psp too. I just hope they discover something new for us psvita users.
i still don’t believe that Dark_AleX left the scene b’coz sony paid him. it was about team GEN stealing his “work”. i remember reading his ‘readme.txt’ in one of his 5.00m33 update saying he’s leaving the scene bcoz his custom firmware being copied by other team without giving him credit. the only CFW other than M33 that time was GEN so i’m pretty sure he was referring to them
I haven’t touched my PSP that much since 2012(?). I wonder if I missed much. I use my PC for everything these days and using my PSP would be a bit archaic.
You wrote a very good information.. We find a latest tech news…