No brick, please.

October 16, 2005 8:53 PM

I just got a PSP (firmware v. 1.52) and want to run SNES emulation software on it, but am TERRIFIED of bricking it.

Should I just take the plunge and try to downgrade the firmware (and if so, I'd like to hear some stories from people who have done this) or just wait for someone enterprising to figure out a workaround that will allow me to run the emulators on my firmware?

posted by LGCNo6 to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

No first-hand experience to offer, but it seems that so far, the only program to brick PSPs was a trojan labelled as a downgrader; a lot of sites cottoned on quickly and pulled the offending download. Think of the trojan as the Fall From Paradise of the homebrew scene; ever since then sites have been more vigilant in keeping dangerous stuff out.

Your best bet, if you want to do some more looking into things yourself, is the resource list at the end of this Wikipedia entry. PSPbrew.com apparently has a custom pack generator that'll throw everything you need together into one easy-to-run package, so that might be the way to go if you're worried about screwing something up by installing everything yourself. In general, if you pay close attention to the user forums and wait for others to take the plunge on new releases, you should be okay. For what it's worth, v1.52 is relatively old news (v2.5 was released recently), so existing downgraders are probably non-lethal and fine to use.

Standard disclaimers about Doing Things That Break Your Warranty apply here, of course.
posted by chrominance at 9:24 PM on October 16, 2005

Looked into it a bit further, and it turns out the PSPbrew packs are not one-click-installs where the firmware is concerned; you have to do that seperately. The packs are for installing a bunch of emulators in one go AFTER the firmware flash. Sorry for the mix-up.
posted by chrominance at 9:29 PM on October 16, 2005

I can't give a definitive answer, but I had a PSP with 1.50 firmware, ended up going to 2.0 because I wanted the browser, then did the hack to revert to 1.5 and it worked fine.

In my experience, works fine. Just don't download that nasty trojan that kills the firmware.
posted by mikeh at 7:08 AM on October 17, 2005