Feckoff.net

Santy was good to me and dropped a PSP down the chimney this year.

Despite being a shower of bastards, Sony really have done a great job (hardware wise, more on this later) with the Playstation Portable. The screen is massive for a handheld, and crystal clear. The manufacturing problems they had during the first 6 months or so of PSP production seem to have disappeared, as reports of mass dead/stuck pixels on new PSP screens appear to have dried up.

Software wise, however, Sony are still up to their old tricks. They really would not like people to be running their own code on their PSP’s, as that makes them no money (tut, tut!). The original PSP firmware version 1.0 had no security against the running of code not digitally signed by Sony, so a vibrant PSP homebrew software scene sprung up on the Internet. Sony then released several new firmware revisions to prevent customers from running non-Sony approved software on their PSP’s. Each version up to and including 2.00 has been cracked or otherwise exploited to allow people to continue running their own stuff. The hackers are reportedly close to breaking 2.01 and 2.50 as well.

The nasty thing about this is that Sony will require you to update your firmware to whatever the latest version is at the time of production of any new PSP game that you buy - i.e. to play Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories (which is excellent, by the way), you have to first upgrade your firmware to version 2.00. Until recently this meant that you had to make a choice - play the latest games and lose the ability to run emulators and other home-made software, or be stuck with old PSP games and keep the ability to run third party software. As soon as an exploit was found to run user software on version 2.00 (and to downgrade it back to version 1.50) Sony released firmware 2.01, which had no changes in it besides closing that loophole.

All PSP’s currently in Irish shops have firmware version 2.01 on them out of the box, and rumour has it that some newer ones have version 2.60, on which practically no progress has been made in cracking.

If they would actually embrace this kind of use for the PSP, Sony could be sitting on a goldmine, but they prefer to crush the competition and lock their customers into their own proprietary formats — only Sony can write UMD discs — , even though “the competition” consists mainly of people who make free software in their spare time. We can see how successful this strategy made things like Betamax and Minidisc, can’t we Sony? Coincedentally, Nintendo are wiping the floor with Sony with regard to software sales on their DS handheld.