[PSP] Pro Online might become available for Phat models

via http://wololo.net/2012/08/04/psp-pro...or-vhbl-users/

Famous scene hacker Coldbird, one of the core developers of the Pro CFW, announced a few weeks ago on the prometheus forums that the “online” feature of Pro Online might become available to Phat (PSP 1000) models, after he discovered a new way to get 4MB extra ram available on the PSP.



For those who don’t know yet, Pro Online (Prometheus) is a new version of the Pro Custom Firmware, that allows you to play online with PSP games that were initially only compatible with adhoc. This is similar to systems like XLink kai, but is completely integrated in the Firmware, and requires minimal setup on your Wifi router.

Due to the amount of Ram required by the network modules for this feature to run, the “Online” feature of Pro online is available on PSP models that have 64MB of Ram, that is, all of them except the PSP 1000. By finding an additional 4MB, Coldbird hopes to load some of the required modules in a different location in order to let the PSP 1000 have all of its typical user-mode Ram available for the actual games. 4MB doesn’t sound like a lot in this day and age, but on the PSP 1000 we only have 24MB to play with, so that would be more than a 15% increase… As a matter of comparison, VHBL takes 50kB in Ram. 4MB is 80 times that.

This discovery came a few days after Sony announced they will be closing their online PSP servers for Eye of Judgement, SOCOM: Fireteam Bravo 3, and Motorstorm Arctic Edge, which leaves PSP players with only unofficial alternate solutions such as Pro Online.

There are limitations to this extra freed ram (which, for those of you who know a bit the PSP’s internals, is actually the volatile memory in partition 5), but hopefully the Pro team will make this thing happen.

In addition, this might be good news for VHBL as well, as from my understanding all that is required can happen in user mode assuming the right syscalls are available. What this means is that we could have an additional 4MB available to VHBL exploits sometime soon, which could improve homebrew compatibility or performance here and there.