Having said I’ll hold off on upgrading my 1.5 Firmware PSP, I’ve gone and upgraded it to 3.02OE-B (Open Edition). The main reason for doing so was that I’d downloaded all the components as discussed in this DCEmu thread and decided it was better to do the upgrade now while its a topic of conversation on the forums, rather than leaving it a few weeks and then having to search for the relevant information.

I followed the instructions to the letter, including formatting my Memory Stick Pro Duo. I’ve now got a shiny new 3.02OE-B enabled PSP, that can happily run homebrew software while still being able to play the latest PSP games.

Problems I’ve come across – I can’t seem to retain a custom wallpaper, it keeps resetting back to none, and the corrupt icon fix (entering the configuration menu by holding the Right shoulder button at boot-up) doesn’t seem to work for some things. Apart from that, it all seems pretty good.

I’ve backed up a couple of my UMD games, and they play happily from an ISO folder in the root of the memory stick, without the need to use DevHook, so that means I don’t have to take a number of UMD discs with me when I’m out and about, which is great. I can see why Sony will hate this software though, as it will make playing pirated software even easier.

So other than the piracy issue, which should be a concern for PSP owners who value new games coming out regularly, this custom firmware would appear to be everything a PSP owner could want, especially one who likes to make use of all the homebrew thats available for the PSP.