Looks like Sony’s latest attempts to thwart the homebrew community has failed again, and now those PSP owners who have not upgraded to the latest firmware version can emulate that very firmware version using DevHook 0.51.

There is a nice long thread over at DCEmu if you want some information on this, although it might just confuse you. I’ve not upgraded to this latest DevHook version, mainly because it writes to the PSP’s flash memory, and partly because I don’t feel there is anything I’m missing by not upgrading.

Until new PSP games come out requiring firmware 3.01, I see no need to put my PSP at risk by messing around with flashing the memory. As the saying goes “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. I’m sure that as new games come to market, there will be a requirement to have the latest PSP firmware installed, but until that happens, and there are actually games I want to play (Gran Turismo 4 Mobile being one of them), I’ll hold fire.

If anyone has upgraded to this latest DevHook version, let me know how you got on, and specifically what firmware version your PSP is natively running, and what things you can (and cannot) do now you’ve upgraded to emualte the 3.01 firmware.