PSP homebrew: Hold+ v3.41 battery saver plugin

The battery-saving plugin gets an update. This baby extends your much-needed PSP battery life, which gets dead useful when you’re playing outdoors. It’s still a bit rough around the edges, but it’s coming along pretty good. More info and changelog in the full article.

Download: Hold+ v3.41
Visit: PSP Development Forum

Simple plugin with major use. The battery-saving plugin from Torch gets an update, giving you Hold+ v3.41. Now you can go play outdoors without having to worry too much about running out of battery before lunchtime. This ought to extend battery life until you can get someplace to charge your PSP.

Anyway, here are the most recent changelogs:

• Changelog v3.41 – Improved faulty Hold switch protection, as there were still some chances of a faulty Hold switch causing problems.
• Changelog v3.40 – Fixed a problem caused by a faulty Hold switch in some PSPs. This made the CPU remain underclocked even after turning off the Hold switch.The problem is the Hold switch doesn’t consistently return a pressed state. It sometimes rapidly fluctuates between an Off and On signal. If this fluctuation occurs within one iteration of the main program loop, it causes problems. Its not humanly possible to toggle the Hold switch so fast, but a loose connection can

Usage:

• Turn on the Hold switch to automatically disable the display and underclock the CPU. Turn off the Hold switch to return the CPU to normal speed and enable the display.
• If you push the ANALOG UP button when turning on the Hold switch, it will only lock the keypad like normal hold mode. The display and CPU speed will not be changed, so that you can watch videos etc. with the keypad locked.
• If you push the ANALOG UP button when turning off the Hold switch, the display will remain switched off and the CPU will remain underclocked, but you can operate the PSP. To return to normal, push the power switch to the suspend position, or just press the Screen button.
• While the PSP is in hold mode, if you first hold down the Select button, you can use the following buttons: Left, Right, LTrigger, RTrigger, Vol+, Vol-, Start.

Installation:

• You can install it in the seplugins folder, and make an entry in VSH.txt. Thus it will be active in the XMB. Its also possible to use it in games by adding it to GAME.txt, but some games may crash etc., if the CPU is underclocked to such a low value.
• Optionally, its also possible to install it in your PSP’s flash0 so that it will work without a Memory Stick. For this you can use FreePlay‘s “NewBTCFNedit” and enable it for VSH mode in the all the PSPBT?NF.bin files. Add it before vshmain.prx.

Advanced options:

If you want to change the clock speed to your own values, you can use a hex editor to change them. The offsets in the file for v3.4 are:

• 0xD48 – CPU
• 0xD4C – Bus (Should be half the CPU speed or less)

The values should be entered in hexadecimal. The default value for CPU is 3C (60 MHz in decimal) and the default value for Bus is 1E (30 MHz in decimal).

Thanks to Torch for the tip!

Download: Hold+ v3.41
Visit: PSP Development Forum