Some Concerns On Where the PSP Scene is Going?

First off the recent releases by Dark Alex and co have brought a fantastic although hacked emulator to the PSP, but also it has raised issues over the legality of the Custom Firmware, now im no tech head so i may get this arse about face (er wrong) but the last release contained some "keys" and that pushed the firmware into the warez territory. (from what ive been told)

I personally dont know about this as ive not actually used the firmware and continue to use a v1.0 PSP, but as a scene are you worried about the direction its taking regardless of how good a release the Popstation emu is. ?

(Now if im wrong about the firmware then please correct me as im only going on what ive been told)

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Originally Posted by wraggster

First off the recent releases by Dark Alex and co have brought a fantastic although hacked emulator to the PSP, but also it has raised issues over the legality of the Custom Firmware, now im no tech head so i may get this arse about face (er wrong) but the last release contained some "keys" and that pushed the firmware into the warez territory. (from what ive been told)

I personally dont know about this as ive not actually used the firmware and continue to use a v1.0 PSP, but as a scene are you worried about the direction its taking regardless of how good a release the Popstation emu is. ?

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Well, as I understand it, the "keys" were only if you downloaded playstation games, not actually included with the release. So really, it doesn't contain any keys, it just contains the method to generate the keys so that the playstation games can be played on any PSP.

The only possible issue will be is that it goes against DRM, but as such it still doesn't contain what you need to fully crack it.

Cloudy

Well upgrade your psp and judge yourself

To do anything on it the user has to purchase or download a ps3 store psone game to obtain the 'keys' you talk about. This firmware may tweak some things but contains basically the same thing as found in a sony 3.03 firmware.

If your confused wraggster, then its basically like a game boy emulator. You have this emulator. If you want to download the rom you do it. Then you play it on the emulator. The users responsible for the legality of the rom they have downloaded.

So the only illegitimate thing going on is when someone downloads a ps3 game they do not own to play their own psone games.

And if your worried about legality all these custom firmwares and devhooks allow the user to play download psp isos why hasn't that bothered you. That is way worse than users playing their psone games on their psp. I for one have about 50 playstaiton games I've kept over the years just cause they are worthless to trade in at a game store.

I think work needs to continue on our own homebrew PSX emulators, so we can fix the bugs that the Sony emulator might never fix. As much as I love the Sony emulator, I doubt that we could do much else with it except play bugged games, seeing as we dont have the source. I doubt Sony would fix them.

TBH ive felt the psp lost its way some time back $ony dont really seem to give a stuff about it.If it were not for the excellent homebrew emulators my p$p would havve gone months back,of late tho my DS has taken up more of my gaming time with stuff like new smb,mario kart,children of mana games the psp can only dream about.

Look, the scene is going where SONY forced us to go. Now I know SONY needs to try and keep the PSP as secure as possible so that game developers will keep developing games but it goes much beyond that.

The last straw was the PS3-PSX download fiasco. Its called a Playstation Portable. The fact that over 2 years since PSP's debut we cannot just connect to a hotspot, log in to a server and purchase/download content is absurd. And there is what? 6 PS1 games officially released for North America? What a joke... Obviously plenty of PS1 games play just fine on the PSP so there is no excuse other than greed.

The PSP is a great portable multimedia device. The problem is SONY has done a poor job fully utilizing the PSP. It seems their focus initially was to kick the Game Boys & DS's a$$ in terms of specs & hardware.

Remember the comment a SONY rep made referring to Nintendo stating that the PSP would take handheld gaming out of the handheld gaming ghetto? Yes, they actually said that.

So sure they have this marvelous gadget that is the PSP but obviously not a plan.

Homebrew is what has fully unlocked the PSP's potential and allows people to do things they never would of dreamed of.

If anyone is starting to feel bad for SONY, don't! They are seemingly abandoning the current PSP in a year or so when the 60GB "PSP2" is unveiled. So SONY will continue with the PSP platform and probably do a better job the 2nd time around.

So basically the current PSP should continue down its current exploited & homebrew-enabled path. Anyone with a guilty conscience can buy the PSP2 when it comes out.

I hope more and more people discover PSP homebrew and more downgraders and exploits are developed. I would like to see this scene grow and still be strong 2 years from now and beyond.

I would urge everyone to tell there family, friends, & colleagues about PSP homebrew and help grow this great scene.

Personally, i will never downgrade. I know you all think it's an idiot idea, but i'll never do something that has the chance to be illegal. I'm not trying to be a noble knight or something like that, but at school, you see people who just downgraded, en then upgraded to Dark_Alex's firmware JUST to play iso's and roms. Isn't it a better idea to make a costum firmware with homebrew, but no iso's?

Its not the way I would have liked to see PS1 emulation but Ive got it
PS1 emulation was the only reason I bought a handheld and I chose the PSP over a GP2X coz I thought the PSP homebrew scene would get there quicker

Its a bit like all the emulators how many people can really rip their own NES,SNES,Genisis games?
I can rip my SNES games with my UFO thingy
and Im also lucky enough to have a couple arcade machines in my draw for the CPS2 emu as well :p

I don't think this even goes that far. It's to my understanding this is no different then the other Dark_Alex firmware releases.

It is essentially a combination of the 1.50 and 3.03 firmware. No "keys" such as those that are included with the PSX downloads from PS3 systems are included. You are only using what Sony provides freely to any PSP owner. Dark_Alex's program is combining the two firmwares together, which yes is a "hack", but still does not provide anything "illegal" in the distribution.

To play the PSX stuff you either have to download with your PS3 or obtain it by illegal methods.

Otherwise it seems to me, minus all the new updates, my PSP is no different then if I had it at 1.50 still.

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Originally Posted by Thomly

Personally, i will never downgrade. I know you all think it's an idiot idea, but i'll never do something that has the chance to be illegal. I'm not trying to be a noble knight or something like that, but at school, you see people who just downgraded, en then upgraded to Dark_Alex's firmware JUST to play iso's and roms. Isn't it a better idea to make a costum firmware with homebrew, but no iso's?

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if people wanted to just play homebrew, they might as well stick to 1.5

roms and isos make the psp better, why would you carry around 3 or 4 umds when you can just carry a memory stick thats already inside the psp,

umds suck anyways, they break real easy, as soon as the window thing is pushed in, they dont work

psx games on the psp are awesome, im not going to wait for sony to release my favorite psx game and charge my $5-$10 even i already have the game sitting there next to my ps1

aint nothing wrong with isos and roms, its just more convenient to me, plus the iso, psx, and hombrew loading straight from the xmb is a nice touch

does anybody know about this ..... i know that when you agree with the upgrade and stuff (official) it says how sony owns all rights..... so some people in school keep telling me its illegal just because the files were tampered with in any way.... is this true?/

I dont think ther is a problem with legallity in the custom firmwares just the legality of the things some people use them for.

id say the only illegal thing is playin psp back ups (ISO's) when u do not own the original!! where as PSX back ups when you dont own the original? who cares? PSX has had its chance 2 shine and its past after all we have the PS3 now, so i dont think sony care about the PSX emulation bein hacked!!

We should be thankful for what we have got. We are lucky we have a full speed Playstation emulator to even be able to complain about minor bug issues in, in the first place. For those who do not want to downgrade, that is their choice (loss) but I plan to use my Psp to its full potential and will never upgrade to any official firmware. The Psp for me is a joy, especially GBA and Psx gaming.

As for Dark Alex's custom firmware containing keys, he is much smarter than that and has made sure nothing like that exists in it. Look at the popstation release, nothing illegal was included, you had to aquire the keys and the base.pbp yourself.

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Originally Posted by wraggster

but as a scene are you worried about the direction its taking regardless of how good a release the Popstation emu is. ?

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No, I am not.

if you read the t&c's that are supplied with the update file one of them states that it is illegal to reverse engineer, decompile or otherwise tamper with the files supplied so by even looking at what sony have coded you are breaking the law. if even looking at the contents of the file is against the law rewriting it is going to land you in a little bit of trouble!

Why would you use a UMD? I mean buy it and convert it and load it like that. Using an UMD is hurting the consumer. If Sony was really intelligent they would stop using UMDs all together and use the sticks. They could make the stocl unwrittable to somehow after the game is added and that would give no one an excuse for converting and using ISOs. Until then I don't think Sony should be telling people to hurt their battery life and load times. I doubt half the people their really play one for recreation so who are they to say that we should wait (sometimes up to 5 minutes) for one race or map to load. I know the loading times on midnight club 3 are long enough to kill somoene.

All Sony really does is try to win over new converters. Once they convert someone to buying the PSP they made their money and the only reason they really fuss about homebrew is that they can charge for some of the features that people here do for free. Like the PSX emulator for example that the Anonymous coder was working on.

Im definitly not worried about where the psp scene is going! The custom firmware's that DAX puts out are clearly one of the biggest developments in the homebrew world to ever happen. I mean playing ANY ps1 game full speed on your psp. Along with having all the advanced features of a highest firmwares that sony put out, but still maintain the kernal of 1.5. Which in-turn give's you the ability to play any homebrew.

The scene will of course have its users who's sole intent is to use there psp for illegal intent. Downloading iso's, warez, and other illegal material. As i see it however, ripping your OWN ps1 disc and converting it for play on your psp is in no way a violation and inturn i think is what DAX's popstation was truely created for.......

Theres nothing wrong with the scene, Its just What users do that determine where the scene will end up in the end.

I think the scene has alot of time left. I mean we get a couple of homebrew releases a day. And a custom firmware nearly like every week.

So it is still going strong

we are all discussing this without mentioning the differences in local laws. neither we nor sony are making the laws. the distributed custom firmware is not braking any laws in spain nor in belgium. i do not know the situation in the rest of the world. we only know that europe is more free world than the usa who predicts to be the free world ;-)

over here i may also change/repair my car though the official dealer will state that my warranty is voided. this is the only disadvantage.

Personally, my major issue with custom firmware is the ISO ability. But (before I get flamed) this didn't stop DevHook because the illegal portion of the process HAD to be done by the user, ie the file downloading ,etc.
This same issue arises with OE. But again it is upto the downloader to do the illegal things, not upto the creator. It would be like blaming torrent client creators for the users downloading the material.

Sony didn't do anything wrong in my opinion, they were perfectly happy with homebrew and emu's before some idiot developed a UMD Ripper, seriously, any of you would have patched the ability for the console to do illeagal things. Custom Firmware is a grey region as you dont HAVE to use it for illeagal things, although you can, you dont have to. If sony didnt patch there firmware Game companies may have sued them for allowing their games to be stolen, no one likes to lose a million dollars.

This topic seems to come round every so often, and perhaps with the events of the last four weeks or so, its an even more valid question to be asking of the PSP community.

While its easy to argue that theres nothing inherently wrong in using a custom firmware (it is simply taking firmware releases Sony has made and combining them to provide the facility to do more than either firmware on its own is capable of doing), Sony would, I guess, view it as a reverse engineering process of its software and a violation of its EULA.

I personally see no problem in using a custom firmware, and I can understand why the ability to play PSP games from the Memory Stick is part of that custom firmware functionality.

However, there is a responsibility of the end user (ie the PSP owner) to decide what they wish to do with their PSP, and not up to the creator (Dark_AleX etc) to determine whether including a particular function is ethical or not. My car can do 160mph, doesn't mean I should drive it at that speed. Same thing with using my PSP to play illegal games, just because it can doesn't mean I will.

At the end of the day however, the number of people with custom firmware is such a small percentage of the 20+ million units sold, I'm sure Sony isn't overly worried (at least no more than any other company selling software).

I wrote a post [PSP-Questions] that is attempting to get a feel for how many people are running custom firmware (I guess most DCEmu readers are probably running some form of custom firmware or 1.5) as well as a general demographic of the PSP scene. Without knowing the numbers involved in homebrew, its difficult to guage if the long term impact on the PSP is going to be postive or negative.

Chances are, Sony will release PSP2 and it will require you connect to the internet and have its firmware checked before you can do anything ;)

The "scene" goes where the wind blows
Watch the tide and catch the wave
Enjoy it while it lasts...

Before you know it this time will be gone
And no will care what firmware you are on.