Well, its been a while. Nearly 12 months since I last posted anything here on PSPCulture. There are numerous excuses, but the main one is that I stopped using my PSP quite so much, and that meant I stopped keeping up with the latest developments in the PSP world.

I do still use my PSP, but not as regularly, mainly because any gaming time is now taken up with either the Wii or PS3.  I’ve only just got the PS3, having fought the urge for quite a while, but a recent 20% off at a well known supermarket chain dropped the price to £199 (for the new 120gb slim model) and I could no longer resist.

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For those of you who have bought a new PSP-3000, there is some great news on the homebrew front. Thanks to PSP developer MaTiAz, a new savegame exploit has been found in the PSP game Gripshift £79.24 (US version) (US version only.) In a similar fashion to the GTA savegame exploit, this ‘bug’ has allowed the devloper to run unsigned code. It does not allow access to flash(0), so there is no hint of a downgrader becoming available, but it does mean that with some development work it should be possible to start playing homebrew games and applications on the PSP-3000 (PSP Brite.)

Copy the contents of MS_ROOT into the root of your memory stick (this will overwrite the first GripShift savegame slot).
Launch the US version of GripShift.
Load up the game (if it doesn’t autoload).
See your PSP run unsigned code.
It’ll autoexit after some time. You can use the home button to exit too if you’ve seen enough.

FAQ
—
Q: Will this allow downgrading?
A: No, because this is an usermode exploit and functions required to downgrade are
only available in kernel mode.
Q: Why the name?
A: Because the original exploit was found by overwriting the player name with “this is spartaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa”.
Q: Can/Will Sony block this?
A: Yes.
Q: I wanna make homebrew using the exploit. How?
A: Get FreePlay’s GS SDK: http://f6y.ath.cx/pspdev/sparta_sdk.zip
It has some constraints though, check the readme.
The Hello World was written with it.
Credits
——-
Exploit and binary loader: MaTiAz
SDK: FreePlay
Greets go to Dark_AleX, Mathieulh, jas0nuk, Hellcat, etc. etc. etc, you know.

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There are a couple of sites reporting sales figures for the top 5 best selling PSP games for the USA in the period March 2005 to Fall (I assume October) 2008.

The list is as follows –

Top 5 Selling PSP Games (March 2005 – Fall 2008)

• Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories (2,000,000)
• Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition (1,100,000)
• Need for Speed: Most Wanted (1,100,000)
• Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories (950,000)
• Star Wars: Battlefront II (809,000)

There are a few interesting things to note about the list, firstly that it only includes US sales, so there are no big hitting titles like Monster Hunter Freedom or Crisis Core, both of which have proved big sellers in Japan. Secondly, the game at number one is responsible for the majority of hacked PSP consoles in existance, thanks to the Save-Game exploit that was discovered way back in 2006.

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