My Big Fat Hack
The Fresh Smell of Homebrewed
I'd been holding out on hacking my PSP fat, even though I've had a slim for a while, because I was under the illusion that without a mod chip it was pointless. How wrong I was. I got bored last week so I decided to do the mod just for fun. For this there are two things you'll most assuredly need. One is PSP battery and a Memory Stick that is magic gate (it won't work with a generic trust me I tried). You can buy these in a combo pack at the link below if you don't want to make them yourself. To verify if your Stick is magic gate go to Video and hit triangle, under information it will tell you if your stick supports magic gate.
It was almost impossible to find a straight forward and current tutorial on this process and I used a few websites to cobble it all together, that's why I'm writing this piece. I'll give some links for the most useful sites. I'll also give you the entire process I went through which required me to install a number of CFWs before I got the most recent. Somehow in Step Four I manged to install 3.4 instead of 3.8 so I've included, in Step Five (in red), what I did to fix that. My instructions are based on the FAT! You have to do different stuff for the SLIM.
Step One: Make jigkick battery, basically a service battery. You can also buy a Pandora battery but that's not much fun. Here's a great tutorial on how to do it for either fat or slim batteries. Make sure to desolder one of the battery terminals so you don't kill your battery by shorting it out or worse have it blow up in your face. Also make sure the battery is fully charged. Once done modding it, don't put it back in the PSP, use your AC adaptor for power or even better yet have another regular battery handy.
Step Two: Make a magic memory stick. You'll need Catb50 Team's Magic Memory Stick creator. Format your PSP memory stick via the PSP. Now attach your PSP via the USB and run the program. It will install Despertar del Cementerio and a 1.5 CFW update file.
Step Three: Unplug from the USB and unplug the AC or take the battery. Now take your jigkick battery and insert it and put the cover back on. When your PSP boots press X when prompted and the Magic Memory Stick creator will do the rest. If your PSP lights up and then goes off, try holding the right trigger when you boot. When it all finished power down and take out the jigkick and put in a regular battery or plug in the AC.
Step Four: Turn your PSP back on and go to the Game Folder. Here you will select Despertar del Cementerio and it will do an install (not sure if you need to do this, but I did). After that finishes you'll need to go back into the Game folder and select the 1.5 CFW update. This allows you to set your Game Folder to run in 1.5 mode, essential. After that is finished you are pretty much done, you should have CFW 3.80 M33-5. Somehow I ended up with 3.4 (it's in files along with 3.8 but I didn't have an option on install, maybe you can just delete the 3.4 eboot). If you end up with 3.4 then go to Step Five. If not skip to Step Six.
Side Note: To set your game folder to 1.5 you'll need to reboot and hold the right trigger when you do so (I had to take out the regular battery and put it back in to get this to work). Go to Configuration and change the Game Folder setting to 1.5 Kernel. There's a bunch of other stuff in here too, be careful what you change.
Step Five: Only use this if you ended up with 3.4 instead of 3.8 M33-5. Make sure your Game Folder is set to 3.40, NOT 1.5. Download these files here. You are now going to update to 3.71 m33-2. Unzip and copy MSINST and MSPFORMAT FOLDER to your C: drive or system drive. Format your memory stick through the PSP. Put your PSP into USB mode. Open a command prompt (Start, Run and type CMD hit enter). Go to your C: drive and type "mspformat\mspformat.exe ? (? is your PSP via USB drive letter typically E: or F:). Hit Y and enter to proceed. It should say "Drive successfully formatted and partition moved." Now disable USB mode and. Take out the memory stick and put it back in. Now open the Despertar V3 folder and copy the contents to your PSP root directory. Now go back to the command prompt and type "msinst\msinst.exe ? (again ? is your PSP drive letter). Type Y and hit enter and when it's finished it will say MS BOOT CODE. Done you now have another magic memory stick with 3.71 m33-2. Use the jigkick battery like in Step Three. You may be able to just go to the Game Folder and run the update. Honestly I can't remember, if you can great, if not just do Step Three. Okay now you are going to need 3.80 M33 to continue and original 3.80 firmware. Copy the UPDATE folder into /PSP/Game/. Also copy the original 380.PBP into the same folder. Now go to the Game Folder and run the update. At the end of the update press X to reboot (if you just turn off the PSP bad things will happen....so I've heard).
Step Six: Now that you have 3.8 M33 or higher all you need to do is go to network update to get the latest CFW from Dark Alex. That's right no more need for all this manual update crap. What a wonderful thing thank you Dark Alex. Also thanks to Hercules form pspmod.com his information was very helpful in figuring this out. Also thanks to a score of poster's questions and answers on various websites.
Now you can use your PSP to watch streaming videos, use it as universal remote control and much more. Here is a list of the top Ten Homebrews. Please feel free to leave comments if you find an error, had a problem or something in my post is unclear. I did this a week ago over a two day period and may have blanked on some of the details. Happy modding.