the cole family blarg

It appears as though there have been a number of methods discovered to exploiting the PSP. While v1.0 PSPs were selling like hotcakes out of Japan because they contain no protection against running unsigned programs off the memory stick, it appears as though some cool memory card swap tricks can be used against the v1.50 PSPs which are sold here in North America. Once you enable the PSP to run unsigned code, it becomes super easy to put games onto the PSP — simply plug the PSP into the USB slot of your computer and copy the files into the \GAMES\ folder on the memory stick.

So far there’s a number of cool applications coming out:
MAME,
SNES9x, ZSNES
Genesis emulators
GBA emulators
etc. etc.

A 512MB Sony Pro Duo Memory stick is only $89 at Costco, making the cost of putting a lot of cool stuff on your PSP very minimal. You could of course always reuse the memory stick for music/video files and stuff like that if you wanted to.

The only evil trick is that Sony can very easily make a firmware update manditory with new game releases… so that the game will say “Need to update to v1.52 first.. do it?”. I guess at least you get the option of saying no.

There exists UMD extractor programs and stuff like that already, so it won’t be long until you can put ROMs onto your memory stick and sit back and enjoy fast loading times.

In the event you are thinking about getting a PSP — I would recommend not waiting much longer, since any NEW stock will have v1.51 or v1.52 firmware included on it — and thus you will have to wait until new exploits come out.