QuickJump QuickGuide #15 – Who’s Who Edition: Fanjita, the PSP freedom fighter
Quick roll call of who we’ve had features on in the past few weeks: Dark AleX, AhMan, MaTiAz, FreePlay, Davee and, most recently, Noobz. Today we’re shining the spotlight on one of the devs behind the big hacks, exploits, eLoaders, and downgraders for the PSP: Fanjita.
Quick roll call of who we’ve had features on in the past few weeks: Dark AleX, AhMan, MaTiAz, FreePlay, Davee and, most recently, Noobz. Today we’re shining the spotlight on one of the devs behind the big hacks, exploits, eLoaders, and downgraders for the PSP: Fanjita.
IN THE BEGINNING…
Fanjita is inarguably one of the most recognizable names in the PSP homebrew community. Along with Dark AleX, he was interviewed by the BBC for his work on freeing up Sony‘s handheld console from its firmware restrictions.
The BBC piece also shed a lot of light on the man behind the name. Fanjita, whose real name is David Court, is actually a professional programmer who just happens to dabble in hacking the PSP for an hour or two a night in his Edinburgh home where he lives with his wife and kid.
Even before he became a professional programmer, Fanjita revealed in an interview with PSP Emulation that he cut his teeth on a Sinclair ZX81. The man has apparently been coding since the age of 10, so it’s not that surprising that he’s had a great many accomplishments in the field of PSP homebrew.
ENTER THE HACKER
Fanjita first entered the PSP homebrew scene back when the most recent official firmware from Sony was 2.0. While he’s known mostly for his work on the various eLoader releases, his first contribution to the scene was a Tetris clone for 2.0. That first taste must have driven him to do more, because he followed it up with the 2.0 eLoader based on Saotome’s 2.0 Eboot Loader.
Using a save game hack spotted and exploited by Edison Carter for his GTA cheat device, Fanjita and Ditlew were also able to construct an eboot loader for firmwares 2.01, 2.50, and 2.60. The eLoader has since grown to cover official firmware updates up to 2.80. The latest version even has support for launching via HEN and custom firmwares and also works on the PSP-2000.
PIRACY AND PANDORA
Ever since the beginning, Fanjita has been an outspoken critic of those who use homebrew as a means for piracy, even calling out those who blatantly asked him for help to pirate PSP games. Despite this stance, however, he has always maintained that downgraders are just tools that give freedom to the end user and that how they choose to use that freedom is up to them.
Downgraders are tools. We provide them because we believe in individual freedom and have faith that human beings can be responsible. We do not like being treated like children by those with whom we spend our money. So it’s your choice what you do with it. – Fanjita
The piracy problem wasn’t the only thing that brought unneeded drama into Fanjita’s little slice of homebrew heaven. A leak that occurred while Noobz/C+D were on the cusp of releasing their universal unbricker — coupled with “the continual pressure and idiocy of the PSP scene” — drove the dev to retiring from working on any major PSP projects. He continued to work on his non-exploit projects, though, among them Noobz’s PSP Slim USB charger plugin and the Furikup PSP phone software.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Nobody knows the answer to that question except for Fanjita himself. With the PSP whole homebrew community celebrating Team Typhoon’s ChickHEN, it remains to be seen what Fanjita and Noobz will come up with to bring the sweet smell of freedom to even more PSP users. Suffice to say, whatever they come up with will no doubt be something grand.
Note: There’s only one more Who’s Who feature left, folks, and starting next week we’ll be shifting the focus to E3 2009. Got any guesses? See you guys then!
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