Mod it ‘Till it Breaks: The Sony PSP
One of the few things we can be nostalgic for from the 2000's
WARNING — “WhileRomeBurns” does not condone piracy or the illegal acquisition of copyrighted content from the Internet without ensuring creators are paid what they’re due. The views herein may discuss certain elements of gaming that would imply piracy, but no links to ROM websites are found here. Be gone, lawyer thots!
Okay … are they gone? Good.
I’ve been on a kick of expanding my video game library. Earlier this year, I downloaded all the games I was interested in from Nintendo’s 3DS eShop before it closed for good. Over the summer, my long-awaited Super NT arrived, and I also modded my Game Boy Pocket to run on an IPS screen. For all those consoles (and more), I have a great deal of cartridges and legally-purchased digital games. However, there’s one problem I keep running into.
As video game consoles come and go over the decades, availability of video games follows. This results in video games being accessible in only one of two ways: Either hoping that publishers re-release the games on modern platforms (ensuring they receive the money I’m spending) or purchasing used games on the second hand market (and publishers don’t see a penny of my money).
Due to the limited options available, gaming is considered to be a legally “grey area”. I’m a big fan of preserving lost content, so in that vein, I was inspired to add a new (re: old) console to my gaming collection: The Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP).
The PSP was a welcome addition to the monopolistic landscape of the handheld market — Nintendo has unquestionably dominated this market since the debut of the Game Boy in 1989. The PSP introduced portable optical media storage (known as the UMD), a 4.3" widescreen display, video and music support, and graphics on-par with the PlayStation 2.
All these features we take for granted on our cellphones today were a huge deal when the PSP debuted in late 2004. Sony was willing to go all out for promoting this handheld by paying artists to graffiti walls in seven U.S. cities. And their first commercial for the handheld featured Franz Ferdinand’s now-iconic “Take Me Out” song:
The handheld drew attention from the gaming community when Kotaku published a picture of Jessica Chobot licking a Sony PSP. Chobot, then largely unknown in the gaming world, went on to work for IGN and Nerdist. These days, she hosts a paranormal reality show called Expedition X on the Discovery Channel. All because she licked a PSP.
Well, I mean, she obviously had talents besides taking a silly photo. It’s just a heck of a start to a career in Hollywood.
The PSP launched at a starting price of $249.99, which calculated for inflation in post-pandemic dollars, is … $404. Good lord. Well, the PSP happily resided in the gaming market until Sony stopped building new units in 2014. Access to purchasing PSP games on Sony’s online storefront was cut off on March 31st, 2016. So these days, unless you have games in that UMD format, your PSP is gonna play two things — Jack, and Diddly.
There’s no legal way to pay Sony money for PSP games on the PSP console. They’ll refuse. Maybe they’ll kindly ask you to understand. But to be fair to Sony, this is a problem that you’d run into with buying games for any retro/obsolete console. You’re at the mercy of the secondhand market, and Sony won’t see a dime of it.
So with that in mind, we turn to modding, by way of installing custom firmware.
What is custom firmware? In a broad sense, it’s unofficial new or modified versions of firmware made by third parties to expand or unlock hidden functionality on a platform. Custom firmware exists for all sorts of hardware beyond video game consoles, including mobile phones, internet routers, and even computers. For a few years, I ran my own routers on the DD-WRT custom firmware, which expanded existing functionality to transform them from $60 routers into $600 powerhouses.
A website called PSPunk offers a straightforward guide to customizing your PSP (I’ll link to it farther down) with different instructions based on your specific model. Mine is the original model, the PSP-1000, and I could choose between running custom firmware on the PSP’s existing 6.60 firmware, or the 6.61 firmware. However, my PSP came with version 6.00, so I need to update the stock firmware first.
An outstanding human by the name of DarthSternie has seen to it to keep a mirrored archive of all firmware ever released for the PSP (as well as other platforms) on their website, using Mega and Archive.org as backups to keep the content alive.
Reviewing my options and recommendations from the PSP community, I decided I’d update from Version 6.00 to 6.60. As the PSP has no onboard memory, I’d have to download the firmware to the external flash storage and install it from there.
My PSP came with Sony’s proprietary flash storage media, the Memory Stick Duo, with a disappointing capacity of 32MB. That’s not a typo. 32 Megabytes. And the storage size of Version 6.60? 32.6MB. I had to get a new card just to update the firmware.
Unsurprisingly, Sony doesn’t sell the Memory Stick Duo anymore, and at launch, a 4GB card cost $29. Fortunately, the second-hand market created adapters that allows folks to use MicroSD cards, greatly expanding the storage capabilities of the PSP. For me, a 32GB card will do, so I picked up a “Micro SD to Memory Stick Adapter” from Amazon for a few bucks.
After its arrival, I installed the 32GB MicroSD card into the adapter, tossed it into the PSP, formatted it, and updated to Firmware 6.60. Now, it was time to head to PSPunk for the real work.
I chose to download the “6.60 PRO C Fix 3” archive of custom firmware. Here’s the process I followed, and honestly, it’s pretty easy!
- Unzip the “660 PRO C Fix 3.zip” archive. Depending on your operating system, you can use a built-in utility, or a third-party utility like 7-Zip (Windows) or Archive Utility (macOS).
- Navigate the newly created “660 PRO-C Fix 3” folder, and copy the following directories: “CIPL_Flasher”, and “PROUPDATE).
- Connect your PSP flash media to your computer. Navigate to “PSP > GAME”, and paste the two directories here.
- Eject your flash media and re-insert it into the PSP.
- On the PSP, navigate to “Game > Memory Stick” and press “X”.
- Select “PRO Update” and press “X”.
- The “PRO Update” app will launch. Follow the prompts to install the firmware (basically just pressing “X” once), and let the system reboot.
- After the PSP reboots, navigate to “Game > Memory Stick” and press “X”.
- Select “CIPL Flasher for PRO-C” and press X.
- The “CIPL Flasher for PRO-C” app will launch. Follow the prompts to install the firmware (basically just pressing “X” once), and let the system reboot.
- You’re done! Your PSP is now permanently hacked with custom firmware.
By going to “Settings > System Settings > System Information”, you can see that your official firmware is “6.60 PRO-C”, just like mine.
As for what to do next? Well, there’s all sorts of options available on the web. For starters, there are numerous emulators for the PSP, and an archived list is kept on Github. Personally, I grabbed “TempGBA mod”, as I love playing GBA games on this handheld.
Now you might be thinking, “Okay Grizzz, we all know what we’re really doing with these consoles, so what about PSP games themselves?” And I get it, but I can’t help you there. And to ensure that we nor Medium get in trouble for anything, I won’t link any specific website that may or may not feature game ROM’s that you can download to play on your PSP. Because that would be bad, m’kay?
I’m all about the good vibes. Heck, I like vibes. I might even love vibes. If I was a romantic, or in the business of romance when it came to vibes, I’d look to compact discs. After all, Mariya Takeuchi’s most famous CityPop song, “Plastic Love,” could be interpreted as a fondness for CDs. Or even a romancer of a CD, as it were. Sending my plastic love in the form of a CD Romance. Who knows what you’d find if you searched the web for that particular term!
One thing I can safely and legally tell you is that there’s a growing community out there doing the work to modify or improve existing console games! A good example comes in the form of Mega Man X4.
Mega Man X4 was the first X game released for the original PlayStation in 1997. Famous for having an atrocious English voicecast and questionably translated lines, a Romhacking.net poster by the name of acediez took it upon themselves to fix and improve the game, calling it “Mega Man X4 Undub”. Their list of fixes includes:
- Restoring Japanese videos and audio, with subtitles as necessary
- Correcting localization errors in text
- Fixing Font sizes in dialog boxes
- Allowing default button configurations to change
So with that information just thrown out there, perhaps you’re on a journey of your own to modify your classic consoles to do things that you previously couldn’t do. Legally speaking, it’s anybody’s guess. Regardless, all that matters is that video games are about having fun on our own terms, be it alone or with others.
