PSP hacking history Part 2: The Sony/Hackers tug o’ war

I tend to have these phases, when I keep thinking about the past. Or maybe, I’m just a bit drunk… But since people liked the previous article about the history of the PSP scene, I believe people will have the same feelings for this one too. Though don’t worry, if you don’t like it, the comments section is a good place to send me death threats. I’ll make sure to read them.

Anyways, around the time when I wrote the first article, it was still slow-going in the PSP scene. Although we had homebrew up to FW 2.6 using the savegame exploit in GTA, people were still stuck with the tedious method of having to load GTA everytime they wanted to do anything with homebrew.

Dying homebrew scene: And yes, for once I’ll say it- The scene was dying. Although I personally never let it show, it was really beginning to get boring with a PSP. Good games were few and far apart. The biggest sellers were actually the first-gen release games. GTA broke records on the PSP, but it was still a one-off game. The only big things happening were in the homebrew scene, with emulators and other awesome homebrew ruling the PSP. And as much as we wanted otherwise, 1.5 was still the firmware to be at. With kernel mode, the level of freedom and power that the programmers got was unmatched on 2.0 and above.

One example was Devhook, the brainchild of Booster. One thing people might not know is that Devhook, earlier known as Device Hook, was released and being updated since the days of WAB. But the difference was that back then, it was an out-and-out ISO loader. And since the people already had other more-reliable applications for that, it was nothing big. Don’t get me wrong though, even back then, it was a great piece of programming. But its complexity was its downfall.

The new versions, however, were nothing but kickass. Full emulation of 2.5 firmware (back then) meant that the 1.5 world was shining as ever. But for the people on 2.01 or above, it was getting very uneasy.

The new beginning: Rewind back to June 28th, 2006. Bright sunny day, the PSP scene was chugging along at a slow pace, and as usual, I was busy ranting in our forums. But something was different. A relative unknown in the PSP scene going by the alias Hitchhikr was going to be the one of the biggest legends of the PSP scene. And boy, were we in for a huge treat! There were rumors that he had magically “cracked” the firmware, and that kernel mode was here on firmware 2.5/6. Was it true? You bet! Within a few hours, the excitement turned into madness. People had become restless. What would this mean for everyone?

Nobody knew.. But everyone was sure that good times were coming. It was quite obvious, since we had people like Fanjita and Ditlew, Skylark and many more looking closely at the huge crater that was 2.5/6 security- a crater which had been the result of some clever poking around on the part of Hitchhikr.

We’re sure you’re getting all teary, wait till you read the whole post after the jump!

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I tend to have these phases, when I keep thinking about the past. Or maybe, I’m just a bit drunk… But since people liked the previous article about the history of the PSP scene, I believe people will have the same feelings for this one too. Though don’t worry, if you don’t like it, the comments section is a good place to send me death threats. I’ll make sure to read them.

Anyways, around the time when I wrote the first article, it was still slow-going in the PSP scene. Although we had homebrew up to FW 2.6 using the savegame exploit in GTA, people were still stuck with the tedious method of having to load GTA everytime they wanted to do anything with homebrew.

Dying homebrew scene: And yes, for once I’ll say it- The scene was dying. Although I personally never let it show, it was really beginning to get boring with a PSP. Good games were few and far apart. The biggest sellers were actually the first-gen release games. GTA broke records on the PSP, but it was still a one-off game. The only big things happening were in the homebrew scene, with emulators and other awesome homebrew ruling the PSP. And as much as we wanted otherwise, 1.5 was still the firmware to be at. With kernel mode, the level of freedom and power that the programmers got was unmatched on 2.0 and above.

One example was Devhook, the brainchild of Booster. One thing people might not know is that Devhook, earlier known as Device Hook, was released and being updated since the days of WAB. But the difference was that back then, it was an out-and-out ISO loader. And since the people already had other more-reliable applications for that, it was nothing big. Don’t get me wrong though, even back then, it was a great piece of programming. But its complexity was its downfall.

The new versions, however, were nothing but kickass. Full emulation of 2.5 firmware (back then) meant that the 1.5 world was shining as ever. But for the people on 2.01 or above, it was getting very uneasy.

The new beginning: Rewind back to June 28th, 2006. Bright sunny day, the PSP scene was chugging along at a slow pace, and as usual, I was busy ranting in our forums. But something was different. A relative unknown in the PSP scene going by the alias Hitchhikr was going to be the one of the biggest legends of the PSP scene. And boy, were we in for a huge treat! There were rumors that he had magically “cracked” the firmware, and that kernel mode was here on firmware 2.5/6. Was it true? You bet! Within a few hours, the excitement turned into madness. People had become restless. What would this mean for everyone?

Nobody knew.. But everyone was sure that good times were coming. It was quite obvious, since we had people like Fanjita and Ditlew, Skylark and many more looking closely at the huge crater that was 2.5/6 security- a crater which had been the result of some clever poking around on the part of Hitchhikr.

DOWNGRADER!: Back then, Dark_AleX, still not very well known, was taking his first baby steps towards his current legendary status. Although his major work had been in the form of an ISO loader, people were still quite happy to know that their PSPs’ future was in good hands. A day later, we already had something to be excited about- A work-in-progress 2.5/6 downgrader. Although it did brick some PSPs, it was pretty obvious that we would have something real in a day or two. And funny as it might be, within a couple of days, we were looking at a 2.5/6 -> 1.5 downgrader. This was more of clever code than outright legendary coding. And as expected, the downgrader was updated within a matter of a few days to include cleaner code and better security.

Devhook: Being one of the most commented (1000+!) and read stories on PSPUpdates signifies the fact that hordes of people were probably peeing in their pants suddenly looking at the power that was 1.5 firmware. And Devhook suddenly became that much more special. The great thing was that although everyone had downgraded to 1.5, they wouldn’t miss any firmware up to 2.6 because they had Devhook. That, my friends, was only the start though.

Within a few days Devhook was updated to version 0.44. The big update was the possibility to emulate firmware 2.71. And although it wasn’t so, the PSP scene was beginning to look like a race between Booster and Dark_AleX. Booster was releasing update after update to Devhook, and Dark_AleX was busy making life for 1.5ers heaven. Custom firmware, only a very-much abused buzzword until now, was finally starting to show promise.

The catalyst was Dark_AleX’s first proof of concept. In a matter of weeks, we were flooded with improvements to Dark_AleX’s code. My personal favorite was harleyg’s custom firmware. But also notable were Zettablade and Lordstrum’s versions of it. If anything, this was the golden time for the PSP scene. The latest Devhook had come out, and a huge surprise was the ability to launch homebrew on emulated 2.71 firmware(!).

Sony fighting back!: Fast forward a week and firmware 2.80 had already been out for a couple of days. Devhook v0.46 had just come out, with more of a bugfix release than anything big. Less than a week later, Sony struck! The owner of PSPSoftware, the release site for Booster’s Devhook had suddenly received a stern warning from Sony. The message was simple- remove a certain file off the servers. Within a couple of days, PSPSoftware was closed down. Personally, I don’t know whether it was the direct work of Sony, or just the owner getting frightened and shutting shop, but one thing was clear – Sony had their eyes on us.

NOPx86: Once that was over, it was back to some quiet times. After all, people like Dark_AleX and Booster had already done a lot of great things. But again, there was someone restless, someone continuously trying out new ways to crack the PSP firmware. That someone is none other than one my good friends NOPx86. Being his tester for a while now, I can proudly say that he’s one of the hardest working people in the PSP scene, continuously trying out new ways to run code on the latest firmwares. And yeah, I can proudly say that he has quite a few tricks up his sleeve, which you’ll see some time in the future. But since we’re talking about the past, let’s continue.

Sometime in the second week of August, NOPx86 was successful in getting one of them modified TIFF files to crash the PSP. Again, there was a buzz everywhere, including our forums. It was partly because of the fact that it was based on the TIFF library, and as such, didn’t require people to buy the GTA umd and run it everytime they needed some homebrew goodness. The icing on the cake was kernel mode homebrew on all firmwares upto 2.71, and user-mode homebrew on 2.80.

Hello World!: Barely 6 days later, I woke up to the amazing image of Fanjita’s Hello World on 7 different PSPs! Truely a sight to behold in itself, it was a dream come true for every PSP user. A little over a week later, Fanjita “ported” the eLoader to the TIFF exploit, which meant that it no longer needed GTA to run homebrew.

Dark_AleX!: He probably had sleepless nights, trying to think of the next big thing for the PSP. He probably didn’t have to think hard enough, because within a week of Fanjita being successful with his Hello World demo, Dark_AleX ported his 2.5/6 downgrader to the 2.71 firmware, only with the extra benefit of not needing a GTA UMD for the same. What was amazing that the PSP scene had suddenly caught up with all of the PSP’s newer firmwares, barring two.

Tetris: A mere 12 days later, the Noobz crew, mainly comprised of Fanjita and Ditlew, released Tetris for firmwares 2.0 – 2.80, a huge accomplishment. And testifying to the greatness of that release is the fact that it has raked well over 70,000 downloads on our site itself! I’m willing to bet that in its lifetime, it will rake in well over a hundred thousand downloads, almost something of a record in the PSP homebrew scene.

Well, that just about wraps it up for this second part of my article. I haven’t covered the news about the custom firmware because, well, it’s still not that long ago ;). Let’s see what the future holds for PSP homebrew in the coming months. With Sony’s feverishly hyped up PS1 emulator, games like GTA:VCS and homebrew like Devhook and the upcoming v2 of PSX-P, I’m willing to bet that the coming few months will probably be the best time for the PSP. And sure enough, we’ll be there to cover every moment of it. Stay tuned!

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