Posts Tagged ‘piracy’

What I learned from FuSa, and other PSP musings

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

A while back, I posted about my experience with PSP 2000’s video output capability – specifically, disappointment with the unscaled output on large-screen TV’s, and the lack of support for games on older CRT’s. The post, surprisingly, resulted in a lot of feedback from the community, on this site, as well as many others – some fanboyish, some understanding or agreeing, but mostly positive and a few helpful. Main suggestion was to use a plugin called FuSa, which is basically able to do everything that the PSP alone couldn’t do.

FuSa scales the image sent to the TV, and can adjust the output frequency, to accommodate things like rendering games to CRT TV’s (which normally only works while watching UMD’s). With the several emulators that I’ve tested, the plugin works remarkably well, which only begs the question – why wasn’t this included in the PSP 2000’s firmware to begin with? While the scaled-down image on a composite output looks jagged and low-res (understandably so), many PSP owners would’ve much rather had bad output, than no output at all – myself included.

Whether or not FuSa is the reason why the newer PSP-3000 models actually will display games through a composite cable is something we’ll never know, but I suppose the point of all this is that custom firmware, and custom plugins make the PSP a lot more than a run-of-the-mill handheld. Don’t get me wrong – the PSP itself was, for its time, revolutionary – and in many ways still is. But I doubt that the system would be as popular as it is today, if it wasn’t for the homebrew community and all of its contributions and offerings. Piracy is an unfortunate side-effect of all this, and while it may be ultimately what Sony’s concerned most about, for classic computer/emulation enthusiasts such as myself, the PSP’s abilities as a homebrew development and emulation entertainment center are the only reasons why I own one (actually, two).

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End to Pandora?

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

Odds are that you’ve probably heard about the new PSP-3000 model (colloquially called “PSP Brite”) that’s due to be released soon, and one that will replace the PSP-2000 series (“PSP Slim”). The new model will include a built-in microphone and a brighter, more responsive screen – an improvement that is almost negligible when one considers the improvements between “Slim” and “Phat” (PSP-1000 series).

Like many other developers and hobbyists, I suspect that there’s more to the system than what the press release lets on – I’m fairly certain that the new PSP model will be built differently to eliminate the extremely efficient “Pandora” hack. A recent dcemu thread discusses just that – probability of the elimination of PSP’s “hackability”, and raises some interesting points, among them “will this stop piracy?”. I’m fairly certain that the answer is “no” – and not just to piracy, but hacking in general. After all, the initial hacks of the PSP centered around badly implemented loading routines in the PSP’s image viewer and GTA: LCS, and as long as there are inquisitive people, there will be exploits to be found and security holes to be exploited. While I expect to see the end of Pandora, I doubt we’ve seen the end of buffer overflow exploits – hardware (and firmware) necessary to deter/elminate buffer overflow exploits would, in all likelihood, break backwards compatibility (not to mention prove too costly).

One thing that I believe is important to remember, however, is that Sony shouldn’t necessarily be chastised for this step. Piracy is an unfortunate side-effect of homebrew development – while I’m not going to venture a guess as to how much money the company is losing/has lost due to piracy, I’m fairly certain that it’s a considerable amount. For many, like myself, the PSP is a retrogamer’s dream come true – there’s no better way to waste hours on end than by playing Legend of Zelda, a port of Doom, or any of the large number of homebrew applications. For too many, however, it’s just a way to hoard modern games.

Sony has stated in the past that they’re aware of PSP’s homebrew community, and that their problem is not with homebrew, but piracy. While I have no reason to trust any particular large company (Enron, anyone?), I have no basis to doubt this fact in the current situation – if anything, homebrew development has helped Sony sell more units. At the same time, piracy hurts those who make the PSP into what it is – the makers of the PSP games. No PSP games means much fewer sales (I don’t think homebrew alone will carry the PSP); fewer sales means no motivation to support or manufacture the PSP.

Comments are welcome.

UPDATE Indeed, Pandora is no longer bootable in the same fashion as the older models

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Posted in Custom Firmware, Rant | 4 Comments »