The Cost of Custom Firmware

When the PSP was first unleashed upon the world, I honestly didn't think it looked to hot. I had read all kinds of rumors about how their circuit boards were mounted wrong and would eventually fizzle out, how the 'square' button's trigger was placed under the screen, and how Metal Gear Ac!d wasn't so much of a killer app as it was a money grab. What hooked me on the device was how open it was to homebrew applications and emulators. The prospect of playing Doom on the go was something I just couldn't ignore.

Like I've mentioned a few times in the past, I've never been particularly rich, so it took me just a little bit more to actually take the plunge and buy the handheld. It wasn't until I saw a video of some mysterious hacker running Final Fantasy IX at full speed that I decided that I needed to own Sony's first foray. I bought mine used and proceeded to fill the thing with ports of Jazz Jackrabbit, Doom, Heretic, POWDER, Nethack and about a thousand Tetris clones. The emulation scene was pretty active as well at the time. We had fantastic NES, Genesis, Sega CD, Gameboy, Gameboy Advance and SNES emulators aswell as the official Sony emulator that they wouldn't actually implement until about a year later. Now before you get all up my nose about the woes of piracy and all that jazz, let me just say that while it did open up the warez aspect, the emulators are what made me do it.


Let's fast forward to tomorrow. Shin Megami Tensei: Persona is going to be laying on my doorstep when I wake up and I won't be able to play it without giving up all that I had originally loved about the console. It's true that there have been a lot more newer games in the past few years that merit owning a PSP, I just can't give up the emulators for a few new games. This really hurts me though, I actually really liked the first Persona and I would really like to play it in a readable fashion. The way I see it, I have three options: Upgrade to the official firmware, buy a new PSP, or wait for a new version of Custom Firmware to be released. While the last one seems to be the most logical solution, those in the scene have come to realize that not a single team is working on it right now.

Odds are I'm going to be purchasing a used PSP 3000 tomorrow. While I can honestly say that I'll be doing so out of desperation, I can at least use my broken analog nub sensor as an acceptable excuse.