Custom Fireware on the Fat PSP

[Bad Mr. Frosty]

Nice to see emulation is still not a taboo subject around this site.

Well, I have a nice old original PSP model. Updated the firmware the other day so I can play UMDs. However, upon reading up on at least 20 different sites about PSP emulation, it seems your not supposed to update the firmware if you want to put various emulators on the thing. In fact theres sites devoted to DOWNGRADING the firmware so the emulating is possible.

However, I've heard rumors that someone has developed a new brand of fireware that allows the system to still play official UMDs, and do the whole emulating thing too. Does anyone have a simple explanation as to how all this works from the ground up? If I don't know what I'm doing, what are my chances of totally screwing up my system?

[Phoenix Gamma]

Official Firmware prevents you from running any programs that aren't authorized by Sony. Custom Firmware is firmware that has all of the official firmware functions, minus the lock on homebrew.

By updating to official firmware, you're basically shooting yourself in the foot, and unless your firmware is 3.5 or below (probably lower) you need a special tool/pandora battery to install custom firmware.

Official batteries can either be hard modded, or you can just buy tool/pandora batteries online for varying prices. After that you need to locate the right files to run.

You're going to need to figure out how to do all that yourself, because modding the PSP also means you can run ISO files directly from the memory stick.